Daily Life of Women in Chaucer's England by Jennifer C. Edwards

Author:Jennifer C. Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Shepherds in a Round Dance, tapestry, from the Netherlands c. 1500, Cleveland Museum of Art. Dancing was a community activity for celebrations. (Gift of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., for the Coralie Walker Hanna Memorial Collection, The Cleveland Museum of Art)

Both men and women were responsible for work on the manor. Men had primary responsibility for plowing and planting, but all peasants worked the fields during harvest and assisted in cutting and gathering hay. Women’s work in running the household, minding the children, preparing food, and clothing the household was valuable to the family as was their work assisting their husbands in the fields. This value was recognized in Anthony Fitzherbert’s The Book of Husbandry: “For there is an old common saying, that seldom does the husband thrive, without the leave of his wife” (Fitzherbert 1534, 143). Women assisted in the weeding, hoeing, threshing, reaping, haymaking, and in any other urgent tasks for which their family did not have enough labor to perform in a timely way, since farm labor is time sensitive. If she was a serf, a woman was also obliged to work in the lord’s demesne lands according to the instructions of his reeve and could be fined in the manor court for not doing her duties as he demanded. Women also performed this work as servants, typically day or temporary laborers, for which work they were paid less than men. This was acknowledged in a thirteenth-century treatise on husbandry: “If there is a manor in which there is no dairy then it is always advisable to have a woman there for much less money than a man would take, to take care of the small stock and of all that is kept on the manor and answer for all the issues there just as the dairymaid would do” (Oschinsky 1971, 427). After the Black Death, women could seek such work for higher wages, such as Isabella, who asked for four pence to reap in Essex, when the statute of laborers limited pay to two or three pence. Meanwhile, by 1380 both men and women in Minchinhampton received the same pay, four pence, demonstrating the volatility of the post-plague labor market (Ward 2006, 85).

In addition to helping their husbands and fulfilling their week works and boon works, women fed the animals, gathered eggs from the chickens, milked the cows or sheep and turned the milk into butter and cheese, and processed wool from sheep and flax and hemp into thread and cloth. Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry details the difficult process of tending the flax, from its March or April planting, when it needed to be “sown, weeded, pulled, rippled, watered, washed, dried, beaten, braked, tased, heckled, spun, wound, wrapped, and woven” so that a wife “may they make sheets, broadcloths, towels, shirts, smocks, and such other necessaries.” He also advised that the distaff, the wooden stick used to spin thread or yarn, “be always ready for a pastime, that thou be not idle” (Fitzherbert 1534, 146).

Women were responsible for their kitchen gardens that produced cabbages, garlic, onions, leeks, peas, and beans.

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