Women in the Middle Ages by Frances Gies & Joseph Gies

Author:Frances Gies & Joseph Gies [Gies, Frances & Gies, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-01657-7
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

8

Piers Plowman’s Wife

Most of our information about the Middle Ages, political, social, economic, is concerned with the tip of the iceberg, the perhaps one percent of the population—kings and queens, prelates, lords, ladies—that ruled the other ninety-nine percent. In addition, the developing (and literate) middle class of merchants, merchant-craftsmen, notaries, and officials contributed to the historical sources letters, accounts, cartularies, and diaries. But the bulk of the medieval population, the peasants whose surplus agricultural products supported the royalty, aristocracy, and clergy, the class that, in the words of an eleventh-century bishop of Laon, “owns nothing that it does not get by its own labor,” and that provided the rest of the population with “money, clothing, and food…. Not one free man could live without them,”1 remained illiterate and, for the historical record, largely inarticulate.

Yet the peasants did leave records: custom books, manor accounts, tax surveys, and manorial court rolls. The custom books tell us how much land was held by different tenants and what services they owed the lord of the manor at various seasons ofthe year. The accounts tell us what crops they raised, what were the average yields per acre, what uses the crops were put to—sold, paid out as wages, malted for ale—what servants and laborers were employed, by whom and for what pay. The tax surveys give us the value of land held by different tenants, as well as what livestock they owned. The rolls of the manorial courts—the lowest in the judicial hierarchy of the Middle Ages, and the only ones in which most of the peasants ever appeared—are the richest source of information, registering transfers of property and recording legislation as well as court cases that give us vivid if fleeting glimpses of village life.

This chapter will focus on the women of the small English village of Cuxham, population something over 110 in the mid-fourteenth century, located in Oxfordshire (northern Midlands), a settlement with unusually complete records, and affording a classic example of the medieval village community and of the manor—the lord’s estate farmed by tenants who owed him rents and services. In Cuxham, village and manor coincided, which was not always the case. Information about other English villages and other peasant women will be used to fill out the picture.

The unusual lord of the manor in Cuxham from the latter half of the thirteenth century was the Oxford college of Merton, its warden and fellows. The situation came about in the following way: in the 1230s the lord, a bon vivant named Ralph Chenduit, had quarreled with the Abbot of St. Albans and been excommunicated. According to Matthew Paris, one day in front of many people at Westminster Ralph jeered, “Look at the monks of St. Albans, just look at them! Why, they have excommunicated me for so long, and so often and so well, that here I am, hale and hearty, and so fat that my saddle will hardly hold me when I ride.”2 But Divine Providence and cholesterol caught up with Ralph, who soon afterward had a stroke and died, to be succeeded bv his son Stephen.

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