Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, by Frances and Joseph Gies
How the family unit tranformed from the economic engine of Europe to the venue for awkward holiday dinners.
Test fix..
Chapter 1: Historians Discover the Family
The grouping of mother, father, and children was introduced to European languages in the 1700s
familia signified house into the early modern period
In the past, "the conjugal unit did not exist in isolate as it does today; therefore it did not need a name"
The family of times past was what we might call a "supra-family"
David Herlihy surveyed the period in Medieval Households (1985)
Sociologists say the function of the family today is the socialization of the child and the channeling of the adult's sexual and emotional needs; in the past, the family functioned for defense, politics, education, justice, church, and manufacturing "Over the centuries these functions have been surrendered one by one to the great external institutions of modern society, the State, the Church, and industry."
A clan is a large group that claims a common ancestor; a clan can exist independently of members, own land, and exter power
A lineage is a smaller group that can actually trace a common ancestor
A network of relatives is a kindred; a kindred is not a corporation
A theory of the family suggests that large family groups were inhibited by high mortality rates in pre-industrial society; industrial society introduces economic and psychological stress
In the past, the family was the principal production unit
In the High Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, the aristocratic landed family was a managerial unit
Marriage only really concerns two people today: bride and groom; church is unnecessary, but state must license and legislate the marriage; in the past, the marriage was arranged by the family under the auspices of the church and community
"Marriage has nearly always been exogamous"
"The incest taboo has so far resisted attempts by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to develop a really convincing and generally accepted explanation."
Kinship is both biological and cultural: are illegitimate children kin? are adopted children kin? are godparents kin?
There are three forms of financial transaction in marriage:
Bridepiece, money paid by the groom to the father of the bride
Dowry, money paid to the groom by the bride's family
Endowment of the bride by the groom or his family
"Abortion has been widely practiced in past centuries... contraception has been practiced or attempted by a variety of means"
The fireplace was invented in the middle ages
There were no portraits in the middle ages; the first portraits (of kings and magnates) appear in the 1400s
Chapter 2: Roots
At the end of the Roman Empire, Roman and German society fused under Christian influence
Commencing as an agrarian republic... the Roman state spread by conquest first over the Italian peninsula and then throughout the Mediterranean littoral. By the time of Christ, it had grown into a multinational military empire, underpinned by a slave labor economy... Its spectacular political adventures were accompanied by an accumulation of wealth by the upper class but little change in the daily life of the mass of the population.
Germans settled in Gaul, Italy, and Spain peaceably
The Great Migrations coincided with the rise of Christianity
Christianity "enjoyed extraordinary success with the barbarians"
Where the Roman proletariat came over gradually and the Roman elite tardily and reluctantly, the Germanic invaders of all national persuasions embraced Christianity
Romans discussed the household, not the nuclear unit. It was the familia (oikos in Greek).
A poor Roman home might have the nuclear family plus dependent relatives (widows, grandmother)
Middling homes would have three or four servanges
Wealth households had many slaves — hundreds in the wealthiest
Under the Republic, the small farm had predominated... Under the Empire, however, large plantations, or latifundia, grew steadily in size and number.
The familia was originally the fundamental economic, social, legal, educational, and religious unit of society, with the economic role coming first. "The family's function as chief producing unit was the basis for all the other roles." The family held property collectively; individuals had little wealth unto themselves. Punishment for crime was applied to the family, likely by another family. One writer called Roman religious "hardly more than a spiritualization of family life." Every household had ap rivate altar with a perpetual sacred flame, guarded by the women.
Romans also observed a clan, the large kinship group consisting of everyone descended from a shared ancestor; this is where Romans got their names; Caius Julius Caesar belonged to the Julius clan; his father's name was Caesar; his own name was Caius.
The head of the household might be a father, grandfather, uncle; he was an absolute monarch; he could reject a newborn, leaving it abandoned outside: "In a society never far beyond subsistence, a new mouth to feed might represent a threat to family survival."
When the father died, the land was divided between adult men so they could establish new households; this was possible because there was abundant land available and high mortality kept heirs few; all of these households belonged to the same clan
Over time, the power of the state impinged on the paterfamilias
A soldier's plunder from war was his family's legal property, under jurisdiction of the paterfamilias; but this caused household discord, so the state dictated that soliders retained their own plunder, recognizing individual property rights for the first time
The upper class had privacy that no one else could afford
Church and state were not involved in weddings, but marriages were religious and legal
In the early days of Rome, the bride received an endowment (coemptio). This shrank to a token payment, while a dowry payment emerged, implying "a shify in the marriage market from demand for brides to demand for husbands"
Women could retian membership in their father's clan when they married, including inheritance rights, which affording them greater independence
Under the mature Empire the pendulum swung. The custom of a substantial marriage gift (donatio) from the groom's family to the bride was introduced and by the third century A.D. came to exceed the dowry. By mid-fifth century the donatio, pledged and delivered before the marriage ceremony could take place, had grown so large as to constitute an obstacle to marriage for many young men, who as a result tended to delay marriage plans, whereas young women (and their families) sought to arrange as early a match as possible.
In Rome, even first cousins were allowed to marry
Marriage ceremony had iron wedding bands, including a white gown, a best man, a shower of grains (walnuts, not rice), a wedding feast, and the carriage of the bride over the threshold
A man might divorce his wife on the basis that she counterfeited hte household keys
As men grew wealthier under the Empire, upper-class husbands gained the right to divorce at will
Augustus perceived a threat to the state: a census revealing that the men of the senatorial and knightly classes, forming the Roman aristocracy, were predominantly bachelors. Augustus recommended to the Senate a series of laws penalizing the childless and unmarried in respect to inheritance, limiting betrothals to two years, and requiring fathers to provide dowries. Motherhood was correspondingly rewarded, the mother of three being freed from male guardianship... The Augustan legislation completed the shift away from the ancient concept of the family as an integral and autonomous mini-state, and toward that of the family as a subordinate social unit, its members individually answerable to the authority of history's rising power, the large national state.
Rome did not prohibit abortion
Contraception was widely practice (not very effectively), including preparations in the vagina and the rhythm method, along with many quack remedies
Infanticide was an accepted practice, "widespread amonth the poor" until Constantine, under the influence of the Christian Church, made it a capital crime in 318AD
Romans could sell their children (though after the 100s BC, it was limited to very young children who the parents couldn't support), and by 200 AD it was restricted to those in extreme poverty
A husband had the right to kill his adulterous wife
Constantine made adultery a crime for men
Homoesexuality (especially male) was common
The Great Migrations, of Germans into Rome, began in the 200s, coinciding with economic decline
The Romans historically admired German barbarians for their morals and simple lifestyle
Left due to "cataclysms still shrouded in mystery", including Hungs, famine, and grought
Migration waves climaxed in 400s and 500s with columns of "thousands or tens of thousands" including men, women, children, and animals, often peacefully, sometimes violently; many were settled on arable land
Migrants sought economic opportunity and technology
Were not literate and had no recorded history or literature
They brought trousers and good weaponry; they had economic and cultural links with the celts
Germans traditionally worked land in common; families owned cropland; pasture was held communally
Men made weapons; women made pottery
Patriarchical
Germans had wergeld (or "man-worth"), a value for every individual based on sex, age, and status; crimes were compensated with payments of a multiple of the victim's wergeld
Payment of bridepiece implies a shortage of women, attested to by the prevalence of abduction
Women could not get a divorce, but men could
Husband could kill adulterous wives
Despite their subordinate status, barbarian women were valued, and not only for sex and procreation. They possessed particular skills, passed from mother to daughter: besides making pottery, they spun and wove with a skill attested by garments recovered by archeologists from peat bogs. They also did the food processing and preparation, performed the healing, and brewed the beer that was already the staple German beverage. Legal texts reveal another value: descent was commonly reckoned in the female line for the good reason that female descent could be more reliably determined than male.
Germans practiced infanticide
Roman perception of Germans was similar to the Eighteenth-century European writers' view of "noble savages"
In both German and Roman society, property was an important part of marriage, divorce was easy for husbands, infanticide, abortion, and contraception was practice, children were gender in their education, the family had an autocratic patriarch, and families had slaves
Germans took up Christianity
Among Romans, Christianity was more popular in cities
Christianity became the Roman state religion in 380 AD
Most barbarians converted t Christianity, translated it to gothic in the 300s
Theologians began to standardize Christian dogma in the 300s, especially St Augustine; they were concerned with the marriage and family customs of the Roman and barbarian worlds
Augustine couldn't find a coherent rationale for family in the bible
Augustine "perceived an old, dying world, awaiting Judgment Day. He concluded: "There is not the need for procreation that there once was."- The church recommended small families over large ones, continence for Lent, and virginity as much as possible, in line with Christian dogma on moderation
The bible endorsed marriage, which introduced a "higher imperative" in married life; Augustine saw marriage as a sacrament based on three goods: faith, offspring, and the sacred bond between two lineages; this made a priest's involvement seem obvious
Christianity forbade incest, keeping the relationships of blood and marriage separate
As marriage was a sacrament, that meant anything undermining the sacrament was impermissible: polygamy, concubinage, divorce; August rejected divorce
Procreation was the only rationale for sex; the church condemned abortion and infanticide and contraception, including the rhythm method, and selling children
"As political unity dissolved in the Roman world, religious unity appeared in its place"
Chapter 3: The European Family (500-700)
In the late Roman Empire, the countryside was dominated by latifundia, slave-manned plantations
By the 700s, the plantations had vanished, with small farms in their place; "a slave society metamorphosed into a free society"
One factor in this change was the inctreasing cost of slaves
Former slaves acquired a moral or "customary" right to the land, which became hereditary
A second instrument of change was colonization, the settlement of men, free or slave, on wilderness land. The colonizers cleared, improved, and cultivated in return for permanent use of the land by their families. Again, there was an oligation to pay rent and services to the entrepreneur who organized the settlement, and again an understanding that the use of the land was inheritable in the settler's family.
Unfree peasants constituted a new social rank
The latin servus turned into "serf"
Slaves never had the right to cultivate land for their own needs, manage their own time, or organize their own labor or that of their family — serfs received these rights
We know very little about these serf-run farms of the 500s and 600s, but we do knot that "the family-household was in the process of becoming the basic economic unit in agriculture"
The Germanic law codes were written down for the first time
Clovis founded a Frankish state in 509, usurping the functions of the Germanic Sippe (see definition in book); families still pursued justice through blood vengenance or wergeld; the Sippe of the criminal had obligations to mount a defense or pay the wergeld, starting with the accused's father and brothers, then relatives; relatives of the victim shared the payment
The Frankish kings outlawed blood vengeance "in the interest of public order", seeking to make the accused pay the wergeld directly (seems like a big deal?)
Polygamy created greater disputes among heirs, inciting violent familial conflict; Clovis consolidated power by killing the men in his family and confiscating their lands
Until 1000, the medieval system of lineage was (unlike Roman) bilateral — descent traced for a short distance through both men and women, with social status derived from both sides; "The system was ego-centered, that is, a network focused on a single person with links that implied obligations and regulated relationships and attitudes."
Men and women maintained close familial relationships throughout their lives
Marriage alliances were crucial, and women participated in marriage strategy (including between barbarian nobility and Roman aristocracy)
Romans now included maternal ancestry in their names (e.g. father, paternal grandfather, maternal great-grandfather)
In the 500s, women shared in inheritance and property, but not in land; German law prescribed that sons divide land equally (partible inheritance); daughters inherited in the absence of sons
Polygamy and concubinage meant that most men had a male heir — with many heirs often fighting for inheritance
Kingdoms were divided up partibly through inheritance; "Clovis's kingdom was divided among his four sons, who plotted, murdered, and battled until only one line survived"
Throughout the early Middle Ages, the old GErmanic concepts of marriage contended with the new teachings of the Church. At first the debate was muted, as the Church slowly defined and enlarged its ideas while augmenting its power to impose them. Exogamy and the incest taboo provided one area of conflict whose opening skirmishes were fought in this period. The Church began by a series of strictures against marriages contracted with affines (in-laws), which council after council labeled "incestuous." The penitentials spelled out the biblical justification (for example, the Canons of St. Patrick): "For the Lord saith, 'and they shall be two in one flesh [Matthew 19:5]: therefore, the wife of thy brother is thy sister."
Gregory I, in communication with Augustine of Canterbury, said marriage to a stepmother or sister-in-law was "a heinous crime", citing John the Baptist's denunciation of Herod (note: Herod's case was much more complicated than simple incest); "such marriage were often highly convenient"; nobility often married the widows of their kin
"On the other hand, individuals or families sometimes found the church's position useful," as families could leverage accusations of incest to break up alliances; the church law cam to prevail through the 500s
At the end of the 500s, Childebert II imposed the death penalty for a man who married his father's widow or wife's sister or a woman who married her husband's brother
In 506, the Church forbade marriage between first or second cousins,with the Pope saying that "no offspring can come of such wedlock."
By the 700s, the concept of monogamy had gained acceptance
Next, the concept of consent crept into marriage; previously, consent belonged only to grooms and brides' fathers; women could be abducted into marriage; abduction was so common, law had a formula for abductors in the form of a public apology:
Dear and beloved wife, as it is publicly known that I seized you contrary to your will and that of your parents, and that by the crime of abduction I have associated you with my lot, which might have put my life in danger if the priests and distinguished persons had not restored understanding and peace, it has been agreed that I give you what I should in the way of [endowment].
Marriage payments shifted through the 500s and 700s, so that the bridepiece (payment to bride's family) was supplemented by a bridegift (to the bride) and a Morgengabe after the consummation of the marriage, so that marriage was created by payments to the bride — an exchange of consummation for Morgengabe; the church sanctioned this system, making the Morgengabe the legal element of the marriage
Wives could not divorce cheating husbands; "The law codes were not concerned with moral issues, only with protecting family interests and apportioning property"
In the 300s, the question arose of whether clergy could sleep with their wives. In 541, councila responded by arguing that a priest should treat his wife as his sister and prescribed a cleric to follow every married archpriest, deacon, and subdeacon everywhere he goes and sleep in the same room with him; eventually the idea that clergy must be celibate gained acceptance, spelled in law in 692 council
In German law, women had to be consulted in important matters and men couldn't sell their wives' property
Early church law say infanticide as worse alternative to abortion and contraception, though economic motivation was considered a mitigating factor
A religious text in the 500s called for continence in marriage; a text from 700 said that a man should not see his wife nude, and any intercourse outside of the missionary position with the intention of conception was discourage; intercourse from behind was sinful, with anal intercourse worse, and oral intercourse the worst; sex was for conception, and missionary was considered the best for conception
Masturbation, homosexuality, and bestiality were considered exceptionally bad
The penitentials penalized mother-son incest (which was presumably non-existent) and brother-sister incest; father-daughter incest was not mentioned, which is certainly the most common
In early-modern Europe, wealthy villas were made of wood; nails were quite valuable
In the early middle ages, the isolated farms and small clusters of dwellings of Europe gave way to villages; later, villages would form around churches and castle; this was a "rural revolution", but the Sippe continued to dominate society
Chapter 4: The Carolingian Age
For a moment, Charlemagne's vast French-German-Italian empire, founded in 800, seemed about to revive that of Rome in a new Geography, but Europe quickly fragmented again... The prolonged period of petty but destructive invasions that followed forged the landowning class into a distinctive castle-dwelling, armor-wearing elite, supported by the peasant families who looked to it for protection.
Peasant men wore coarse linen shirts, leggings, heavy shoes, and hooded tunics
Peasants lived in one-room houses made of wood and clay, with a table, one or two benches, and straw pallets to sleep on; the floor was earthen
A family might have a donkey, some cows, oxen, or horses
Peasant families might stay close to work inherited land in common; large families are likely preferable, but inhibited by mortality rates and economics
Younger children, especially girls, in low peasant families were absorbed into richer households and returned to their families when they reached marrying age (france in the 800s, and become more common later)
Men and women often found spouses outside of their own village, which helped to strengthen security and stability by augmenting numbers and building alliances, "huddled together for protection"
Some threatened villages were abandoned, residents fleeing into the mountains
One village in France shows serfdom disappearing in the 900s, displaced by sharecropping (St. Victor)
In the early middle ages, the church was not heavily involved in marriage; the church prohibited sex for pleasure, even within marriage
By 700, the church had largely banished polygamy, marriage between first cousins, and marriage between in-laws; next the church added godparents to the prohibition and increased the degrees of consanguinity
What motivated the Church to multiply the impediments to marriage is a mystery to which scholars have not found a satisfactory solution. British anthropologist Jack Goody in 1983 advanced a bold suggestion: that the Church’s extension of exogamy, together with its opposition to polygamy, concubinage, and divorce- remarriage, constituted a deliberate strategy designed to limit the aristocracy’s ability to produce heirs so that its estates might more easily fall into the hands of the Church through bequests.
David Herlihy, on the other hand,
suggests another reason for the Church’s attitude: a wish “to prevent rich and powerful males from collecting or retaining more than their share of women.
The author of the newly prohibited degrees of consanguinity was St Boniface. Boniface reformed the marriage customs that formed the basis of Frankish political diplomacy, backed by King Pepin, who saw the alliances as a threat. Pepin suggested that consqnguinity should be prohibited to seven degrees, which became law.
Boniface also prohibited a man from marrying the family of any women with whom he had slept (this prohibition held for several centuries)
In the early 800s, the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals prohibited marriage to anyone who shared great-great-great-great-great grandfathers (almost no one would have known this lineage)
The incest prohibitions facilitated a convenient legal strategy of inventing a blood relation to break up a marriage, prompting the church to tighten the definition
The church was developing a new conception of marriage as monogamous and indissoluble, "a lifelong commitment to one person." The Merovingian kings and aristocrats were "openly polygamous"
Mentions a couple of divorces presided over by Hincmar
Hincmar advocated for the indissolubility of marriage and "advised men to exercise caution in choosing their wives, because once they had taken them, their defects had to be borne"
Hincmar had a sensational, conspiratorial view of married men, who (he argued) killed their wives for adultery without proof so they could take a new wife or concubine, some having their wives "led to the market to be butchered and thrown to the pigs." He believed that divorce would lead to hordes of ex-spouses living in violation of God's will
St Paul had said that chastity is best (note: Paul heartily endorsed celibacy); Hincmar upheld this view, but argued that marriage offered order and stability
Hincmar said that legitimate marriage had four qualities: the parties must be equal, free, and consenting; the women must be given by her father and properly endowed; the marriage must be publicly celebrated; and the marriage must be consummated.
Marriage was indissoluble because it was a sacrament ("a mystical act analogous to the union of Christ and the Church"), mutually consentual, and sexually united.
Hincmar quotes Paul who said that spouses do not have the "power of hiw own body", and owe the use of the genitals to each other
Hincmar rejected all rationale for divorce (illness, sterility, sorcery, etc), leaving only one option: proof that the marriage was illegitimate in the first place
Hincmar's work contributed to a gradual transformation in the concept of marriage, a shift in emphasis from the contractual—family alliance, property exchange—to the personal and sexual—mutual consent of bride and groom and their physical union... in the eyes of the Church money, land, and power were now forced increasingly to share the stage with human feelings.
Chapter 5: Anglo-Saxon England
Barbarians and Romans interacted through the Early Middle Ages
German migrants populated the English countryside, staying somewhat separate from native populations
The invaders (Anglo-Saxons) retained their Germanic language and
The Anglo-Saxons brought with them a form of society in which the dominant element was the larger kinship group. This group was not the territorial clan (a corporate body with a territorial base, tracing its origin to a common ancestor) but the kindred (an ego-focused group consisting of each individual's close relatives). This network... determined the status of its members, negotiated marriages, and arbitrated inheritance. It exercised a degree of control over individual behavior, lent protection to its members, pursued vengeance for them, and paid or exacted compensation. As with the Sippe on the Continent, the Anglo-Saxon kindred's juridical authority was eroded by the rival power of lords and kings, who flourished in the prosperous agricultural environment of England.
Anglo-Saxon kindreds were bilateral; women retained their natal wergeld in marriage; some women were seen as "peace-weavers", who formed alliances between feuding families through marriage
Some land had to be kept in the family
King Alfred differentiated between the male and female line of his family as the "spear" and "spindle" sides
Royal succession was male
The ultimate progenitor was the German chief god, Woden; after the advent of Christianity, he was displaced by Noah, Adam, and Christ
In the 900s the archibishop of canterbury anulled a marriage on the grounds that the couple shared a great-great grandfather
King Aethelbald only kept concubines and never married, which distressed St. Boniface; his assassination was seen as a vindication
Peasants lived in straw-thatched houses of wattle and daub or turf; animals lived in the house
"Early settlements were small and scattered", and the vikings drove peasants to abandon many smaller settlements, to cluster in larger villages around churches, surrounded by common fields
There have been no traces found of dwellings of noblemen or kings
Walled towns (burhs) appeared to protect people against vikings
There were almost no castles in England until 1066
Wealthy homes contained chests, curtained beds, tables, cushioned chairs, and wall hangings; the wealthy had little comfort or privacy
The year 1000:
The "Second Period of Invasions" by Scandinavians and Arabs prompted the era of castle and town-wall construction
The old warrior nobility that had long ruled Europe's serf-peasant population began reluctantly to give up its violent habits and even offered intermittent observance to the Church's "Peace of God," which forbade plundering churches and monasteries and robbing the poor.
Hincmar had convinced the rulers and nobility to accept indissoluble monogamy and the incest taboo
The morning gift to the bride from the groom had appeared
Marriage shifted from family-alliance to new household formation
Everyone lived off of the land, which was passed from generation to generation by partible inheritance, an "ancient law". Mostly this was among men; in Anglo-Saxon England, it was also among women
Chapter 6: The Family Revolution of the Eleventh Century
Starts with a description of an epic poem written in the 12th century that harkens back to a crisis of the family in the 8th century; the head of the family "disregards his brother and his son... to the black monks of St. Benedict he gives his land and rents and mills", out of fear of death. The moral of the story is that individual salvation has triumphed over kinship. The cause is clergy greed.
The family revolution described in the story transpired around the millennium. "Deathbed bequests to the Church were evidently one factor in the deterioration of the old order. Others included the fragmenting of patrimonies by partible inheritance and the weaking of the central monarchy and dispersion of power."
Under partible inheritance and individual property rights, every birth, death, and marriage fragmented the family holding. Feudal land held by peasants' customary rights was largely protected. Kin couldn't do much to halt this process due to the emergence of private property rights.
Under these conditions, according to Duby, "enormous transfers of property" took place, a large share of which went to the Church, not only in death gifts but also to endow monks and nuns entering religious establishments. "The Church provoked and arranged these offerings, managing to obtain lands that would best complement their domains." Descendants of the great families, living on the scattered remnants of ancient patrimonies, sank in the social scale into the minor nobility. A few of the leading families held public office and with it benefices that they could not sell, divide, or give away.
From 950 to 1000, many lesser aristocrats descended to the condition of peasants. Some families disappeared completely.
"Around the millennium, by a mechanism that is not well understood, a profound change took place in family dynamics." (Note that Europe was going through a period of massive population growth after the Justinian Plague and during the Medieval Warm Period.)
As many noble families had been undone by partible inheritance, the nobility temporarily experimented with impartible inheritance, where an association of brothers would hold the property in common. One son would manage the family estate and could marry; others would remain unmarried. The others might become knights, join the church, or stay in the household. This eventually gave rise to a new form of impartible inheritance: primogeniture, the succession of a single son (usually the eldest).
The most important factor behind the development was the breakdown of central public authority-the monarchy—and the consequent diffusion of power to regional authorities, such as the counts who had been the appointees and delegates of the Carolingian kings. The Frankish monarchy had slowly decayed through the late ninth and early tenth centuries. As the king gradually lost touch with the counts, once merely his deputies, they became autonomous hereditary regional sovereigns. In 890 in the Mâconnais, the office of count was held jointly by two men, Letaud and Racoux, probably brothers, who passed it on to Racoux's brother-in-law, Aubry of Narbonne. Aubry was succeeded by his son Letaud in about 945, and his son's son Aubry in about 970. Thus the office was first made heritable, then heritable by primogeniture. An identical process took place one level down at a slightly later period. Under the count's authority, his representatives were the castellans, governors of the castles built amid the turbulence of the Viking and Saracen invasions to guard public order... Crude as these early castles were by later standards, they conferred immense power on their commandants, who dominated the local populations, wielded their power unchallenged, and soon made their office of castellan hereditary... Around the year 1000 the castellands went a step further, withdrawing their obedience to the count and assuming autonomous lordship of their own areas. Late in the eleventh century, the lesser aristocracy, the knights, also began to pass on family estates to a single heir, abandoning the frereche. The change in the shape of the family was singaled by an element that made its historic first appearance in the documents of the time: the surname or patronymic, passed down in the paternal line. This development was entirely original, bearing little resemblance either to the complex Roman system of nomenclature or to the naming system of the early Middle Ages.
There were no surnames in Macon before 1000. They appeared through the next century with increasing frequency — descriptive nicknames, names of castles, names of estates. It started with magnates, then to castellands, and finally to lesser nobility.
Through the same period, family economics shifted: Morgengabe, the gift from husband to bride, disappeared, while the dower (a transfer of property to the wife) became more restricted (a lifetime concession, received on the husband's death until the wife's death). "A wife could no longer bequeath to the children of a second marriage lands of her first husband received as a dower." Meanwhile, the dower (a gift from the bride's parents) reappeared. The husband became the administrator of the property.
The change in the wife's status accorded with the new ideology of the integrity of the estate, which was now transmitted from one generation to the next through the male line. Family property and male head were united by name and in function; other family members were auxiliary or subordinate.
Younger sons became perpetually dependent on the family unless they joined the church. If they married, they had to bring their wife into the family home.
At the same time, the family gained more power as the power of the king and the count wained in the post-Carolingian era, and families became important military units.
This was a "family revolution," and it transpired from the late ninth to the eleventh century. This time saw a "radical change" in the nobility. Previously, the kindred group formed horizontally around one member who held royal office, dividing inheritance partibly and recognizing maternal and paternal forebears, using first names. Now the noble line descended from father to son, carrying a unique surname tied to an estate. "The rise of patrilineage paralleled that of feudalism, the social, economic, and political system by which a lord granted land to a vassal in return for military and other services, the act solemnized by exchange of oaths of protection and loyalty."
Feudalism took the place of royal rule in many ways (which tied king to castellan to knight). "The great noble families took on the character of ruling dynasties, and at every level of the aristocracy the family became a kind of little dynasty, with a single heir who succeeded to a domain." The family centered around the heir.
This era sees the rise of the coat of arms (incl. the arcane system of heraldry) and genealogy.
The Anglo-Saxon kings traced their ancestry in the male line back to Woden and Adam, but the practice was not general, even among kings. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, genealogies began to be composed for the great regional lords... As time went on, genealogies were written for the lesser lords, and eventually for the knights.
The oldest extant genealogy comes from the 950s.
The revolution also saw the fall of women's status, "while castellans and knights as well as the great autonomous counts and barons amused themselves with their new coats-of-arms and genealogies."
Chatper 7: New Family Models
The family at all levels felt the impact of the great commercial revival of the high Middle Ages, the rapid growth of trade and manufacture and the generation of a money economy. One factor in the surge was the slow, steady growth of the agricultural segment. Another, more spectacular, was the rapid proliferation of long-distance commerce, as the Muslim domination of the Mediterranean was successfully disputed by the fleets of the Italian cities. Pack trains wound over the Alpine passes carrying wool cloth from the Flemish cities, and in the opposite direction, luxuries from Italy... Forests were cleared, swamps drained, and villages founded, creating for many families a frontier environment. Especially noteworthy in this respect was the Iberian peninsula, where an advancing frontier developed in the wake of the Reconquest of the land from the Moors.
Improved cultivation, associated with technological innovations--horse traction, the wheeled plow, the three-field system--helped provide a more stable economic basis for the nobility, replacing the plunder no longer so readily available in a world growing more orderly. At the same time, the new inheritance policy of the nobility resulted in a strange new byproduct: the younger son... a rootless adventurer, an upper-class social problem. His sisters constituted a second problem: marriageable young women marooned in a world where only a fraction of the marriageable men possessed a source of livelihood.
The dowry came back, and brides lost more privileges.
The High Middle Ages saw many sensational marriage scandals. "Kings, nobles, and the public in general still felt that a husband could, if he wished, divorce his wife. The Church flatly disagreed."
The Church also began seriously enforcing consent as a prerequisite for marriage, annulling forced marriages.
Popular secular opinion allowed an unmarried men to have mistresses, though the Church was more inclined to view these paramours as prostitutes. Eventually the Church accepted these relationships as effective marriages by the 1000s. However, that raise an important question around property rights: "When could a woman, or for that matter a man, be confident that a marriage had taken place?" Peasants often had quiet, sometimes clandestine marriages based on tradition. These marriages posed problems in the Church courts.
On the other hand, the prohibitions against incest created an easy mechanism to dissolve a marriage, either by one of the spouses or a political enemy. Spouses seeking divorce would hire a genealogist to find or invent a distant connection (an affair, a godparent, a shared ancestor) to nullify the marriage. The church had to create clearer rules for what constituted a valid marriage.
Gratian created those rules: a marriage required mutual active consent. A father cannot compel his daughter to marry (in principle). Gratian thought that marriage was the only essential element in a marriage. He said that even a couple who exchanged vows in absolute secrecy had a valid marriage. However, he also that the couple should physically consummate the marriage and also have "marital affection," as marriage should be a "union of spirits." He also said that concubinage constituted an imperfect marriage. This quickly became the basis of legal marriage in the eyes of the clergy and the public.
(Mentioned later: "Gratian's clear-cut emphasiss on the concent of the principals, even in the teeth of parental wishes, was a radical break with the past.")
Peter Lombard added the detail that there must be "words of present consent... words that stated explicitly that they took each other, starting at this moment, as man and wife." This uniquivocal declaration sealed the marriage and it became the essential element.
Some confusion remained around this, but it effectively turned marriage from a social arrangement (based on mutable relationships) to a contractual one (based on either the verbal contract or the deflowering of the bride).
In 1215, the the church started to crack down on the incest divorces. The church also called for weddings in churches, with a verbal contract.
Of course, there is no essential basis to any noble line. Some lines might claim to trace their lineage back to a great warrior, but these warriors mostly lived in a world without genealogical records, where ancestry was kept orally, not in writing. Moreover, most noble lines never originated from a great warrior — they were political inventions by or for influential families. By the High Middle Ages, noble families felt pressure to legitimize themselves with a great ancestor — a demand that was either factually impossible or practically implausible. So nobles made their scribes forge ancestral documents to invent progenitors for their noble lines.
Repeated over and over, this figure was ever the same, a successful adventurer, idealized and stylized to resemble the twelfth century's popular literary image: the heroic knight-errant.
This literary image was not based on real ancestors. Rather, it was based on the influential figures of the day: the knight class of the nobility. These were younger sons of noble families, unlikely to inherit the family estate. As such, they had a tenuous claim to nobility. Literature depicted them as "brave, adventurous, and trained in arms." Scribes painted an image of a mythical Arthurian past (already many centuries gone) based on the chivalric culture of the day, itself modeled on a romantic imagined image of past heroes. The chivalric knight provided the inspiration for the invented progenitors of the noble lines.
Except for those who went into the Church, all young noblemen, heirs as well as cadets, underwent a period of vagabondage, often with a mentor chosen to initiate them into the game of knight-errantry-war, tournament, adventure. Traveling with bands of companions, the young knights led a life in which pleasure mingled with violence, death was a commonplace, and turbulence reigned.
The family split between the eldest son, destined to become the patriarch, and the younger sons, disinherited bachelors. One twelfth-century commentator wrote:
Who made brothers unequal among the fraternal relationships of nature? Out sons have to yield their place to the isolated fortunate of a single rich one. The first of them is overwhelmed with the whole paternal inheritance: the second deplores the exhaustion of a rich patrimony and laments his penniless dower. But did not nature divide equally among sons? Nature assigns equally to all....[You ought not] to make unequal in their patrimony those whom you have made equal by the title of brotherhood, and whom, indeed, you have made to be both alike by the accident of birth. You ought not to grudge their having in common a thing to which they are common heirs.
Enterprising younger sons married an heiress to secure noble status and true adulthood. Only the patriarch of a family earned the right to sleep with his wife in the great chamber, which, in the 1100s, probably held the only real bed in the castle, reserved for the heads of the family. However, the heir could not marry and occupy the great chamber until his father died, unless he married an heiress.
Finding an heiress was thus a convenience for older sons, an imperative for younger sons.
The younger sons were the "martyrs" of primogeniture, but also ironically the model for their familie's noble progenitors.
Because families were patrilocal — the married couple stayed in the male home — they had an economic incentive to keep sons as bachelors while marrying away their daughters. The age of brides dropped while that of grooms rose and dowries grew. Families sent their daughters to convents, which quickly filled up. Some became "beguines," nuns without convents — the chaste, cheerless, lonely female counterpart to the knight-errant son.
This was a city-building era. The monastic movement "created large, orderly nuclei aorund which crafstmen, merchants, and formers could congregate." Meanwhile, vikind raids impelled communities to secure themselves by crowding together and surrounding their villages with city walls. Clusters of houses popped up all over northwest Europe around monasteries or behind ramparts. In some instance, rural aristocrats moved into these cities to serve as military defenders or attackers, securing an opportune position to manage commerce.
Through the Middle Ages, Christian rulers fought the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, driving the Moors from Europe. The reconquest established a frontier. When land was liberated, the rulers built a castle, surrouned by an urban core, and then encircled with farmlands, pastures, and villages.
Reconquest Spain had sex-blind partible inheritance — all children received an equal share. Frontier communities upheld this tradition. Moreover, women held their own property, which could revert to her own kin on her death.
Where elsewhere in Europe women were losing many of their old property and inheritance rights to the new wave of male dominance, and marriage gifts to the bride were depreciating while her dower rights were curtailed, in Spain none of these things had yet happened. The new philosophy of primogeniture and male lineage that robbed women of both power and status had made no headway here. On the frontier especially, the wife enjoyed prestige and authority, owing to the husband's frequent absences on military expeditions, from which he often failed to return.
Chapter 8: Peasants Before the Black Death
In England, all land fell under the feudal governance imposed by the Norman Conquest. No one "owned" land (allodial). But peasant holdings passed from one generation to the next as if they were owned. Land might have been "free" or "villein" where the tenants paid either money rents or labor services, but this distinction blurred over the centuries. Villein land was called "customary," because it was held under the custom of the manor.
In a village, both the highest and lowest families were generally free, while villein families were middling. The poor free families were cottagers with small parcels of land insufficient to support themselves, forcing them to sell their labor.
By this time, the Germanic customs of feud and wergeld had disappeared, replaced by feudal governance.
A policing system called frankpledge... assigned all males over the age of twelve to groups called tithings, each numbering ten to a dozen and headed by a capital pledge or chief pledge. Collectively, the tithing was responsible for the behavior of its members. It presented minor local police manors in court.
Between the late 1100s and late 1200s, surnames became common. Most came from occupations, places, or father's first names (or sometimes mother's first names). Naming practices took time to stabilize. A man who married a widow and took over the holding inherited from her first husband might also take on the first husband's surname.
Champion country and woodland country.
"Champion" refers to the field. "Champion country" constituted the plains of Northern Europe and a band of England from the Channel through the Midlands to the North Sea: open country with large stretches of good farmland. Here the main system of cultivation was the open field system, often identified with medieval agriculture.
Two, three, or more large unfenced fields were divided into strips for plowing, each cultivator working a number of strips scattered among the different fields... The peasants themselves decided what crops to plant and when, and when the fields were to lie fallow.
Land unsuitable for cultivating was used as common pasture. Families lived in clustered villages under strong manorial control, with impartible patrilineal inheritance.
The open field system came from the Germanic tribes during the great migrations. Among themselves, peasants saw little distinction between free and unfree. The serf was free "in relation to all men other than his lord." Nonetheless, serfs strove for freedom if they could.
The serf (or "villein" in England) paid fees on regular occasions; he had his legal dealins in the lord's manorial court rather than the royal courts; and he owed labor service to his lord (which would later be commute to money payments).
Public opinion generally opposed selling or giving-away land, which was inconvenient for both lord and peasant. However, "the pressure of population and shifting family fortunes inevitably created a land market."
"The family was the basic labor unit." Men did outside work (plowing, sowing, reaping, haying, winnowing, threshing). Women performed inside work (cooking, milking, dairy processing, spinning, weaving, animal-feeding, vegetable cultivation, and foraging). Children helped with inside work, as well as gleaning, shephering, animal care, and baby-sitting. In the high season, women and children helped in the fields.
The lord usually had a monopoly on the mill where families ground their wheat. The miller rented the mill for a fee.
The open field system encourage mutual aid, cooperation, and solidarity. However, it also created some strife. Peasants might trample each other's grain, cut hay from them meadow out of turn, or allow their animals to damage crops. As peas and beans provided valuable protein, the peasants could only pick them under each other's supervision. Peasants could only cart and carry produce during the daytime, using specified entries and exits.
The picture conveyed by the bylaws is that of a community aware of both the necessity for cooperation and the need for carefully policing cooperative tasks.
Leading families monpolized the village offices, such as the reeve — the manager of the lord's farm and overseer or villein labor services.
Like the nobility, peasants could only marry when their fathers died or retired, so they could take over the property. Men tended to marry in their twenties or early thirties, and grooms were in high demand. Brides' fathers paid dowries and merchets. The merchet was a payment to the lord to compensate for the loss of the daughter from the estate. If she took inheritance with her, it was taxed.
Peasant primogeniture created the same types of problems as experience by the nobility. Younger sons might work as day laborers, enter the church, or enlist as soldiers. Convents refused peasant girls, who could either work on the family holding for their brother, become a servant for another family, or find work as a laborer.
Due to late marriage, high mortality, and general privation, peasant families in champion country stayed small, mostly as nuclear households. Families with more land tended to be larger and more complex. In one town, Broughton, the wealthiest third of the households accounted for over half of the population.
They also accounted for a preponderance of the crime. The young men of Broughton, and especially those of the main families, appear frequently in the court rolls cited for disorderly or violent behavior.
Crimes included attacking a neighbor's house, damaging houses, assault, domestic issues, fornication, and having children out of wedlock.
Sometimes a lord might crack down on crimes to paid his debts. In one instance, a crowd of young women in the town of Wakefield weere founded up and charged with sexual crimes because the Earl needed money to fund a divorce.
In two-third of adultery cases, the culprits came from leading families. Widows could be charged with adultery and have her land seized.
For old-age care, an adult might make an arrangement for a maintenance contract with a younger person. A son might take over his parents' holding in exchange for lifetime care for his parents. The parents might receive a room in the house, pre-specified amounts of food, fuel, clothing, laundry, linens, and, importantly, "the right to warm themselves by the fire." Sometimes an ageing person might take out such a contract with a monastery, with similar provisions, including the noteworthy "place by the fire."
In the 1200s, these early villages clustered around a common green or a church. If there was a manor, it was nearby. If not, the lord might live in a nearby village. Well-worn paths connected the houses and fields. Alternatively, in a "street village" the villages might string their houses along a road leading two other villages or a town.
The "croft" was a small enclosed area cultivated as a vegetable garden. Most houses were built with the old wattle-and-daub technique — interlaced wands, coated with clay, supported by a timber frame. A peasant home might have had wooden tables, benches, chests, brass pots, cups, and dishes — but never beds. The family slept on straw pallets on the floor.
Families strove to keep their holdings intact, so they limited their offspring and therefore the population. No one in a peasant village would have been very rich, though some would have been more well-off.
Woodland country included Brittany, Normand, and the southeast of England. Each family worked its own farm on a compact field encircled with hedges or ditches. The landscape was dotted with small hamleys and scattered farmhouses. The woodlands had weaker manorial control and partible inheritance, which sometimes included daughters.
During the 1200s, the process of subdivision erroded family holdings at increasing rates. The community had little say in cultivation practices. Lords had greater control over the land and more freedom to dispossess, buy, and sell, creating greater variation in economic status, "some families making fortunes in land, others losing their small holdings entirely... Partibility itself encouraged sale by creating small, easy-to-market parcels... in areas where partible inheritance was practiced, society was fluid, dynamic, and unstable, the fortunes of families shifting through the effects of industry, skill, shrewdness, perhaps sharp dealing, and luck."
Chapter 9: The Aristocratic Lineage
The system of primogeniture, buttressed by the adoption of estate names, genealogies, coats of arms, family mottos, and the impressive symbol of the family castle, gave the self-conscious aristocratic male lineages of the thirteenth century an appearance of invincible solidity.
While we think of noble families as ancient, in fact they proceed through a constant lifecycle of creation, mutation, amalgamation, and eventual extinction. In fact, carried on by a single male heir, noble families generally existed constantly on the brink of extinction. "Only a tiny handful managed to hang on in the male line from one century to another." Of the 136 baronial families that received a summons at the end of the 1200s, 36 had disappeared by 1325, 89 by 1400, and 120 by 1500. Of 17 English earldoms in 1400, only three had belonged to one family for more than a century and ten for less than half a century. Nobility had fast turnover and brief eminence.
One result was that fear of extinction — or of royal wardship, sure to be costly to the estate — caused parents to hasten children's marriages to the limit of legal decorum.
The most common cause of noble extinction was mortality.
In a stationary population, 20 percent of married men have no children when they die, and another 20 percent have only daughters. For the medieval lineage, infant mortality, disease, and war all accentuated the danger.
Noble children often had marriages arranged for them by age ten.
Nobles used primogeniture to protect the integrity of the estate. Though noble parents still wanted to provide something for each of their children. By custom, any property conquered or purchased could rightfully be given to younger sons, which allowed parents to provide for all of their male children.
As estates splintered and grew, successful lords acquired large, disorganized, scattered estates, with impersonal connections to distant tenants. Fearing cheating local managers, the lords assigned bureaucrats as officers to watch over their estates, keeping meticulous accounts. Unofficially, these offices became hereditary, becoming petty dynasties.
The fireplace was a new invention in the Middle Ages, and conquest architecture was military-residential.
Chapter 10: Children in the High Middle Ages
Women were responsible for midwiffery and child rearing, so doctors ignored the subject. Births happened at home with a midwife. Midwives delivered the babies of queens and noble ladies.
According to Batholomaeus Anglicus, the aim of the father was multiplication of the species.
Infanticide persisted through the Middle Ages, regarded as less than homicide but worse than negligence.
Children were treated as responsible adults from puberty.
Child marriage was aristocratic, as it served no purpose for peasants or artisans.
Until age eight, children mostly played games. After the age of eight, they received chores at home. Boys guarded sheep and geese, pastured oxen and horses, gleaned the grain. Girls picked gruit, fetched water, helped in the kitchen. Eventually boys went to work in the fields.
Some adolescents from all classes went out to become servants in other households. Nobles sent their children to the houses of their relatives so their sons could learn chivalry and their daughts social graces. Peasants might effectively sell off their daughters to a master who would feed, clothe, lodge, and pay her. Eventually he would help her find a husband or send her home to do so. Boys might do so, but it was seemingly uncommon.
Corporal punishment was commonm, but even in the Middle Ages it had its detractors. Wrote St. Anslm,
tell me, my lord abbot, if you plant a tree-shoot in your garden, and straightway shut it in on every side so that it has no space to put out its branches, what kind of tree will you have in after years when you let it out of its confinement?"
Marriage and the Family in the Year 1300
By 1300, peasants had family names. Many peasants had freedom, and villeins effectively owned their land. Marriage implied consent, though still involved parental oversight. The Church had gained control over marriage, giving priests a key role in family life.
Part IV: The Late Middle Ages
Chapter 11: The Impact of the Black Death
Prato saw the number of households fall from 4000 in 1310 to 950 in 1427. In the English countryside, mortality in some areas ran up to 65%. Petrarch wrote, "How can I begin? Where shall I turn? Everywhere is woe, terror, everwhere... Where now are those sweet friends, where are the loved faces, where there caressing words, the gay and gentle conversation?" The plague recurred over the years. Petrarch wrote, "It returns and attacks once more those who were briefly happy."
After the first plague outbreak, subsequent outbreaks hit the unexposed children the hardest. The outbreak of 1363 was called the "children's plague." Evidence shows that the plague had a higher mortality rate among children in children.
When the plague struck, the population growth of the 1200s and 1300s and stalled. Europe had run aground on economic stagnation, creating widespread poverty and hardship, which the plague dramtically worsened. Mentions a study by David Herlihy of Impruneta.
Records show that in late 1349 and early 1350, people lived life. In the town of Halestown, of the holdings that fell vacant in the plague of 1349, four-fifths found tenants in the following year, and the tenants worked the land. To work the land more efficiently, villagers consolidated their holdings and grew hedges to enclose their cattle.
In Kibworth Harcourt, the average holding grew from twelve acres pre-plague to twenty-four acres after. Primogeniture persisted as families could now afford to buy land for their younger sons.
In the decades after the plague, anti-authority violence increased, including assaults and disobedience against lords' officials. Villages neglected their labor duties for their lord. By-laws multiplied, enforced by village officials. Property law grew in popularity.
R.H. Hilton says that the poll tax was the immediate provocation of the Peasants' Rebellion.
The expectations aroused in the peasants by the new conditions of land and labor collided with the determination of the lords to hold down wages, raise rents, and enforce labor services, in a word, to repeal the effects of the Black Death. The rebels were not the dregs of peasant society, as Hilton shows, but rather the "whole people below the ranks of those who exercised lordship in the countryside and established authority in the towns." Many of the leaders were well-to-do peasants, such as the Suffolk rebel Thomas Sampson, who owned 200 acres of land, 300 sheep, and 100 cattle. The focus of the rising was the most developed region of England, East Anglia and the Home Counties, where free tenure was widespread, where a market economy prevailed, and where an active land market operated.
Landless peasants acquired new privileges, notably the day wage in place of the old annual stipend, and all-money wages in place of the mixture of money and victuals.
These reforms made it possible for a laborer to move about in search of optimum employment and lifted him permanently out of the status of serfdom. Armed with a little cash, a landless peasant might lease a field and plant a crop.
Cheap land and expensive labor inverted the pre-plague economy, shifting incentives away from labor-intensive crops like cereals to land-intensive crops like sheep, cattle, and legumes.
The result was a more flexible and resilient agricultural economy, distinctly advantageous to the peasant family.
In response to depopulation, survivors of the plague produced children. The marrying age fell a economic opportunities improved and aristocrats panicked to secure the lineages. In Prato between 1300 and 1371, the marrying age dropped from 40 for men and 25 for women to 24 for men and 16 for women. The birth rate also increased. Tragically, the birth rate tended to peak in the year before a plague outbreak.
Chapter 12: The Late Medieval Peasant Family (1350-1500)
After the plague, peasants saw a "marked improvement in material comfort." Villages became larger as farm buildings proliferated and farmhouses grew in size. Houses built with stout timber frames and plaster walls became more common. Doorways developed timber posts and crossbeams. Masonry appeared in the foundations of homes, barns, and sheds. Houses with multiple rooms and a second floor for sleeping quarters (accessed by ladder) became more common. The stone hearth, popular in castles, replaced the open fire in the middle of most homes, opposite the door and vented through a brick chimney rather than a hole in the roof.
More furniture appeared in houses: chairs, stools, benches, cabinets, mattresses, cushions, bed curtains, and wall hangings.
Landless laborers became much more common (as high wages gave them an incentive). Some of these laborers earned enough income to be taxed at the maximum rate (one twentieth of movable goods), the same rate as the landed peasants they worked for.
After the plague, women harvest workers received the same wage as men (note that harvest time saw the highest wages generally). Women repeaers and thatchers in some towns received the same wages as men.
Through the fourteenth century, better-off peasant families freed themselves from serfdom by taking office or simplying defaulting on their services. These successful peasants became "yeoman." The yeoman still paid fees and taxes to lord and state, but
typically he had enough cash surplus to spend something on marriage feasts, baptismal gifts, and funeral masses. Often he found extra sources of income beyond sales of crops and animals. He could hire out his equipment-plow, cart, oxen —with or without his own or his sons' labor. His wife or other family member could brew ale. He might take in temporary lodgers, itinerant tinkers and carpenters, or pilgrims, since only the largest towns offered regular inns.
(Interesting that most towns still didn't have inns.)
Young peasants took romance into their own hands, courted and holding games and events to do so.
Priests concerned themselves with youth's virginity, but many marriages began with an illegitimate pregnancy. Sometimes this was deliberate, as men wanted to ensure his wife would bear him a child.
The marriage ceremony took place in front of the church door (which was very public) where the couple shared vows
I take thee, Agnes, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, if holy church it will ordain, and thereto I plight thee my troth.
However, historians have found that many marriages were clandestine. (Four fifths in one church court.) Youth exchanged vows under ash trees, in bed, in a garden, in a blacksmith's shop, in a kitchen, in a tavern, in the king's highway. As these cases appeared in court, a woman claimed that the marriage had taken place, and the man said it had not, creating the impression of a deceitful seduction.
Peasants of the age rarely divorced. They could not use the noble strategy of discovered incest, as most "scarcely knew who their grandparents were, let alone their third and fourth cousins." Without written records, this was a non-starter.
Nonconsummation and impotence still provided grounds for divorce. In one case, "seven honest women" were assigned to investigate an allegedly impotent man, one of whom,
exposed her naked breasts, and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John. And she embraced and frequently kissed the same John, and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him that for shame he should then and there prove himself a man. And she says...that the whole time...the said penis was scarcely three inches long..remaining without any increase or decrease. (quoted)
In lieu of divorce, peasants often separated informally without court involvement, perhaps even with the involvement of the church, on the grounds of cruely, adultery, impotence, or even incompatibility.
Chapter 13: A Family of the English Landed Gentry
In the Late Middle Ages, aristocracy was divided in three tiers:
Great regional lords, somewhat royal and sovereign
Castellan local lords
Knights and wealthy freeholders
England only had two classes:
Barons, the knights vassals
Knights and gentry
The English classes were not divided by wealth. Knights could be wealthier than barons. However, it was relatively easy to become gentry. Successful peasants and merchants could ascend my degrees into the lower aristocracy by acquiring property, marrying rich, or serving the king.
By this time, the nobility lived in better material comfort, received better education, and indulged literary and artistic interest with lavish tapestries, windows, and architecture. The former preoccupation with violence faded.
Chapter 14: A Merchant's Family in Fifteenth-century Florence
Adoption was rare in the Middle Ages. And despite many unwanted children, the church doubled down on opposition to contraception, citing the sin of Onan. The church denounced sodomy as degrading. Herbal, physical, and magical contraceptive techniques were popular, embodied in the proverb, "If you can't be good, be careful." David Herlihy that these practices may have affected population growth, though the most significant factor was the age at marriage. While nursing increased the time between pregnancies for women most women, wet-nursing could decrease it for wealthier women, especially in the city.
Marriage and the Family After the Black Death
After the plague, the medieval family bounced back through earlier marriage and more children. Serfdom gave way to free tenure and wage labor. In the 1400s, houses grew in size and improved in construction, especially in the cities. Marriage remained as an economic function, with the dowry getting larger.
Part IV: The End of the Middle Ages
Chapter 15: Legacy
The opening of the age of European exploration and colonization, coming on top of the technological revolutions of printing and firearms, and soon followed by the Protestant Reformation, provided later historians with a convenient stopping point for the Middle Ages.
Both Romans and barbarians would have found marriage and the family in 1500 radically different from what they had known. The single most important change in the European family between Roman times and the Reformation was the reduction in its functions. Religion was now the property of the Christian Church, justice had passed into the hands of lay and ecclesiastical courts. Feudal custom, craft guilds, national governments and armed forces, schools and universities had further impinged on the family's economic, social, and educational roles... The power of clan or kindred waxed and waned with the power of the State; when government was weak, the supra-family was strong, and as government acquired durable vitality, the clan withered.
The rich had more children.
Families functions as economic units, and prioritized their own survival foremost, especially in the design or marriages and the project of child-rearing. This was less-so the case for peasants, who were more likely marry out of affection, with spontaneity or secrecy. Society was always concerned over daughters marrying without their faithers blessing. Protestants opposed clandestine marriage which was "convenient" for seducers. In the 1500s, churches insisted on the presence of two respectable witnesses for a legal wedding and eventually rejected clandestine marriages, reinforcing the public and legal stance of the marriage. "Marriage was an event that transpired in a definite way at a definite moment." Philippe Aries wrote "At five to eleven, one is not married, at five past, one is."
This change established an inflexible marriage, "either married or not married," with no legal intermediate situation.
The emergence in the late twntieth century of informal conjugal living arrangements as a prelude or substitute for marriage may be seen historically as a long-delayed response to a problem created by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Juan de Torquemada said in 1457, "Marriage signifies the conjunction of Christ and the Church, which is made through the libery of love. Therefore, it cannot be made by coerced consent." This was the movement of philosophy towards the individual relationship to Christ rather than community.
Through the Middle Ages, the church continued to facilitate separation as a "substitute for divorce." Town councils dealt with separations and attempted reconciliations. In one instance in 1377 Belgium, a woman was ordered to reunite with her husband, on the condition that he not gamble, drink, or take jewels from the house, otherwise he would have to pay for the separation himself.
Luther attacked the consanguinity rules,
Take as your spouse whomsoever you please, whether it be dogparent, dogchild, or the daughter or sister of a sponsor... and disregard those artificial, money-seeking impediments.
While the incest taboo receded a little, it did, of course, remain in some form to the present day.
Luther also attacked the Catholic Church's preference for chastity over marriage, arguing that family life was a high ideal which protected property and honor and created healthy bodies, forming the foundation upon which society is governed.
Many of the virtues Luther attributed to marriage might have been borrowed from Hincmar of Reims, who seven centuries before had pointed out the function of marriage in bringing order to social relations. Like Luther, Hincmar valued married, but like St. Paul he believed celibacy even better.
In the 1500s, some Church commentators started to endorse sex in marriage without procreative intent (without contraception). In the Middle Ages, people believed that women had to orgasm in order to conceive, so theologians believe that the husband had a religious duty to prolong copulation until his wife came. In the 1400s, a professor of medicine at the University of Pavia wrote a treatise on how a man should arose his partner, with meticulous instructions "by kisses and caresses, till her eyes shone and she spoke with shortened words, to a full state of readiness."
Contraception and abortion were not in fact terribly controversial subjects in the Middle Ages; their history as controversy belongs to the modern period. Infanticide, on the other hand, ceased to be controversial. The accepted means of population control in the classical world was outlawed by the unitiring efforts of the Christian Church.
Infanticide likely remained common in the West through to the arrival of contraception and legal abortion in the twentieth century, perhaps as common in Victorian England as in India.