Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [42]
Occasionally violence came on a larger scale. The Bedfordshire coroner reported homicides resulting from a melee between the men of a knight’s household and those of the prior of Lanthony; from the siege of a church in a dispute over the right to a piece of land, involving large numbers of attackers and besiegers; and from a pitched battle between the villages of St. Neots and Little Barford.46
Besides such amateur lawbreakers, bands of professional criminals roamed the countryside. Bedfordshire coroners recorded the depredations of one gang of thieves who in 1267 came to the village of Honeydon at about vespers, armed with swords and axes, seized a boy named Philip “who was coming from his father’s fold,” “beat, ill-treated, and wounded him,” and forced him to accompany them to the house of Ralph son of Geoffrey. Recognizing the boy’s voice, Ralph opened the door, the thieves fell upon him, wounded him, and tied him up, killed his mother and a servant, and ransacked the house. They then broke into and burglarized seven more houses, killing and wounding several more people. The boy Philip at last managed to escape and give the alarm, but the gang fled and apparently was never apprehended.47
Another band of “felons and thieves” committed a similar assault on the village of Roxton in 1269, breaking through the wall of a house and carrying away “all the goods,” breaking into the house next door and murdering a woman in her bed, finally invading the house of John the Cobbler by breaking a door and windows, dragging John out and killing him, and wounding his wife, daughter, and a servant. A second daughter hid “between a basket and a chest” and escaped to give the alarm. In this case the thieves were identified by the dying wife of John the Cobbler, one as a former servant of the prior of Newnham, the others as men who had collected the tithes for the prior of Cauldwell and as “glovers of Bedford.” They were arrested and brought to justice.48
One thief became a victim of his own crime when he entered a house by a ladder to purloin a ham hanging from a roof beam. When the householder, Matilda Bolle, saw him leaving and gave the alarm, he panicked, tumbled from the ladder, and died of a broken neck.49
6
MARRIAGE AND
THE FAMILY
WITHIN THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY, THE BASIC social and economic unit was the family household. The number of its members fluctuated through the generational cycle: young couple, couple with children, with grandparents, with brother or sister (or aunt or uncle), solitary widow or widower. Information about the composition of the average household is scarce and unreliable, but the consensus among scholars is that it was small, with no more than five members, and most commonly nuclear—that is, husband and wife with or without children. Size of household tended to reflect economic status, rich households supporting more children, other relatives, and a servant or two.1
One important characteristic of the thirteenth-century peasant household was its autonomy. The larger kinship groupings (clan, sippe, kindred) that had played an important role in Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval France and Germany had lost their powers of protection and supervision, along with the need for such powers. Their functions had been taken over by new police and judicial agencies of the community and state.
The two great fundamentals of family history are marriage and inheritance, always closely linked. In open field country, impartible (undivided) inheritance was the general rule, holdings passing to a single heir, usually the eldest son. A study of seventy-five cases of succession in the Midland village of Wakefield showed that a single son inherited from a father in fortyseven cases; in nine, in the absence of a son, a daughter or daughters did so. In the remaining nineteen cases, a son or daughter succeeded a mother, a brother or sisters succeeded a brother, an uncle succeeded