Trials and tribulations

Medieval women were busy: working, bearing children, winning and losing daily battles for health, wealth and happiness. The mundanity of lives and deaths in medieval communities is never so starkly recorded as in the Coroners’ Rolls that survive from those distant centuries.

1271. It happened in the vill of Ravensden [Bedfordshire] on the night of Sunday next before Easter Day in the fifty-fifth year [of the reign of Henry III: reigned 1216–72] that Walter Bedell of Renhold came to the house of his wife Isabel, Reginald’s daughter, in Ravensden, and asked her to come with him to the grange of Renhold to get a bushel of wheat which he wished to give her, and she went with him. And when they reached the meadow called Longmead, he at once struck her over the left ear, evidently with a knife, giving her a wound three inches in length and to the brain in depth; afterwards he threw her into the water of a brook called Ravensbrook. And on the following Monday Matilda, her mother, Reginald’s wife, first found her dead; she raised the hue, and the hue was pursued…¹⁰

In the thirteenth century, I have no doubt, just as in the twenty-first, young men were told by their elders and betters not to point dangerous weapons at people. But now, as then, accidents will happen, sometimes with the most unfortunate outcomes…

It happened in the vill of Goldington [Bedfordshire] on Tuesday in Whitsun week in the fifty-sixth year [of Henry III’s reign] that a woman was accidentally shot in the right eye with an arrow; fifteen days afterwards she died from illness due to pregnancy…¹¹

The Coroners’ Rolls, by their nature, highlight unusual deaths; but the ever-present risk of open fires and the necessity for working parents to leave young children alone and unattended must have made the sort of domestic tragedy reported here all too common:

It happened in the vill of Barford on Friday next before the Assumption of the Blessed Mary in the fifty-first year of King Henry at the house of William Blanche – that Muriel, his daughter, who was almost six years old, and Beatrice, her sister, who was almost three years old [were in the house] while the said William and Muriel, his wife, were in the fields, and a fire broke out in the said house and burned it, together with Beatrice, William’s infant daughter…¹²

And, in an age characterised by violence, warfare and epidemic, it is easy to forget all the other dangers of everyday life – in this case, an industrial accident in a brewery:

October 1270.

Among all the other crimes, petty and capital, that dogged medieval society, are notices of familiar misdemeanours in the line of commercial fraud. Medieval weights and measures laws, the forerunners of our own consumer protections, were designed to protect merchants and, perhaps, consumers from those competitors who would try to pass off poor-quality or under-weight goods, as the following record from the City of London shows:

1310. On the Monday next before the Feast of St Hilary the bread of Sarra Foting, Christina Terrice, Godieyva Foting, Matilda de Bolingtone, Christina Prochet, Isabella Sperling, Alice Pegges, Johanna de Caunterbrigge and Isabella Pouveste, bakeresses of Stratford, was taken by Roger le Paumer, Sheriff of London, and weighed before the Mayor and Aldermen; and it was found that the halfpenny loaf weighed less than it ought by eight shillings. But seeing that the bread was cold, and ought not to have been weighed in such a state, by the custom of the City, it was agreed that it should not be forfeited this time. But in order that such an offence as this should not pass unpunished, it was [decided] as to bread so taken, that three halfpenny loaves should always be sold for a penny; but that the bakeresses aforesaid should this time have such penny…¹⁴

It seems that these baxters got off lightly.

At the centre of rural life lay the hearth; and women’s dominion over social space, reflected in the keys and strike-a-lights that hung from their belts, is expressed in the internal organisation of the home. An eighteenth-century observer in northern Germany, admiring the design of the long house that had been so characteristic of medieval settlements there and which was then undergoing its last evolutions, saw that the central position of the hearth was designed so that its mistress

…can overlook three doors, greet people entering the house, offer them a seat, while keeping an eye on her children, servants, horses and cows, tending cellars and bedrooms, and get on with her spinning and cooking… Each task is linked in a chain with the others.¹⁵

Above all, women were constantly occupied. Management of children, domestic animals, the dairy, the loom and the washtub, with or without the help of domestic labour, filled their days. At harvest time they could be found in the fields with sickles, cutting corn stalks; in the dark months, after the slaughtering of beasts, they dried and cured meat and fish, eking out stores of autumn produce, making and mending. That is not to say that men were not also fully occupied: they appear overwhelmingly in medieval pictorial images either fighting or, for the most part, cutting wood, ploughing, carting manure, mending nets or threshing. If men’s and women’s labours lay in distinct activities, those must at times have been shared by all; and there seems little doubt that children of both sexes were worked hard too. St Alpaix (died 1211), one of the few well-known holy women who came from a demonstrably poor rural background, in Burgundy, was her father’s eldest daughter and principal helper, goading the oxen as he guided the plough, carrying baskets of manure or tending the family’s sheep, before the work broke her physically.

If the lives of rural women were unremittingly hard, the expanding towns and cities of medieval Europe offered some of them independence, a professional career and even wealth. David Herlihy’s analysis of tax records in Paris from around 1300, when it was substantially the largest city anywhere, shows that although women were recorded as the heads of only around one-tenth of the city’s households, they were to be found in a wide variety of occupations, not just as household servants. They were pedlars, dressmakers, laundresses, beguines;^Ω silk, linen and wool workers, barbers, nurses, fishmongers, wax-workers, baxters, innkeepers and cooks. Increasingly, professionalisation and the rise of guilds would exclude women from some of these trades – especially the textile business – as they already were from practising the law; even so, widows were allowed by law to continue to practise their husbands’ professions.