Unquiet Women by Max Adams

Author:Max Adams [Adams, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788543408
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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. Their unadorned accounts of accident, malice aforethought and petty larceny are all the more touching for their baldness and for the fragmentary glimpses they offer of lives otherwise unrecorded; and they largely speak for themselves. First, a shockingly violent murder:

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. Amice Belamy, Robert Belamy’s daughter, and [Sibyl] Bonchevaler were carrying between them a tub full of grout [a mix of herbs for flavouring beer], intending to empty the grout into

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