The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England

by Barbara A. Hanawalt

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions.

Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Medieval, Medieval History, British Literature, Research, Historical

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

A specialist in medieval English social history, Barbara Hanawalt is Emeritus Professor of History at Ohio State University. . She received her PhD from University of Michigan in 1970, and taught at Indiana University and the University of Minnesota before moving to Ohio State University in 1999. She has served as President of the Medieval Academy of America and President of the Social Science History Association.

Reviews

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very informative work. This is an academic book, based on the author’s own research into primary sources and presenting her arguments against other scholars. But it is readable if you have a strong interest in social history, which I do. Basically, it focuses on rural agricultural communities in England in the 14th and 15th centuries (with a bit of evidence from the 13th and 16th): how people lived, what work they did, what different life stages looked like, who their closest ties were. Hanawalt draws extensively on coroners’ inquests into accidental deaths, which no doubt have their own biases (imagine painting a picture of our society based primarily on wrongful death lawsuits!) but certainly present a wealth of information.

Some highlights:

- English peasants at the time lived primarily in longhouses (except the poorest, who lived in cottages). These would only last a couple of decades, as the combination of thatched roof and largely mud-based walls (timber frames filled in with wattle-and-daub or cob, which was a mixture of mud, straw and chalk) would soon cause them to disintegrate.

- Despite the fact that they didn’t actually own the land (rent had to be paid to the lord), inheritance of it was extremely important, and in order to get land to work, you had to either inherit it or marry into it—or, work awhile as a laborer or servant to save up for “entry fees.” Since your economic status would depend on how many acres you cultivated, this was extremely important: 3-4 acres meant you’d struggle to feed even a small family; 30+ made you wealthy for a peasant, and somewhere around 15 seemed to be typical. Men, who were usually married when they died, generally left “their” land to their wives and/or eldest sons in some combination.

- Hanawalt argues that late-medieval English peasants had weak ties with extended families—surprisingly similar to today. One key piece of evidence is that people who died without a spouse or children, rather than leaving their land or belongings to other relatives, more commonly had it sold to fund prayers for their soul. People with something to spare often left bequests to their community (for instance, for roads and bridges) or their friends, but less often to extended family—who also don’t seem to be around in accidental death cases, nor acting as guarantees for their relatives’ loans. Absence of evidence isn’t always evidence of absence—maybe people with more robust family networks to guarantee their loans were able to avoid getting sued for them—but all this together does suggest something. In the life of a medieval English villager, it seems that nuclear family came first, friends and neighbors second and extended family a rather distant third.

- Also surprisingly to me, evidence from the time seems to indicate a contempt for old age and the elderly similar to what we see today, both through their treatment in the literature as well as lack of status in their families. Older people tended to resist living with their children if they could (at least reserving a separate house on the same property). Those with land but no family often made contracts with younger people—most commonly single men—who would move in, work and generally inherit the land, and provide for them. Those without land or family could wind up vagrants on the roads. But even those with local adult children could wind up begging or making retirement contracts with non-relatives!

- Less surprisingly now that we know that much of human development is biological, Hanawalt does uncover evidence that adolescence was a distinct period of life. Children began to be given chores young, and girls in particular would be sharing their mothers’ work by the time they were preteens. Boys seem to have a had a longer intermediate stage though, judging by their lack of accidents in fields and construction sites, where adult men tended to have theirs—teenage boys were more likely to get into trouble around the house, or while fishing or engaging in some other activity. Meanwhile, there’s little evidence the very young canonical age of marriage (12 for girls, 14 for boys) represented typical practice, which seems to have been actually marrying in one’s late teens or early 20s. And the legal age of majority was 21.

Plenty of other interesting information in here as well. I didn’t always agree with Hanawalt’s interpretations of specific cases, but I appreciated learning enough about what’s actually in the record to be able to draw my own conclusions. I also might have liked a little more in-depth look at some topics: for instance, Hanawalt seems to view serfdom as simply fading away sometime in the 15th century, as peasants just stopped working the lord’s land and paying the more servile fees, and the lords let it go and that was that?—and even before this time, the distinction between free and unfree peasants and what that meant does not get focus.

I was also left wondering about some of the details. For instance, there’s a lot of people dying by falling into tubs here, which you wouldn’t expect from a healthy adult. Were they having seizures at the time? Did they hit their heads? Or—as the water was often boiling—will even being briefly scalded do you in without modern medical care? Medieval coroners apparently didn’t find this weird. But given that the object that accidentally killed someone would be confiscated and sold (for the lord’s coffers) there was certainly an incentive to claim people were killed by the cheapest plausible thing. One can’t help wondering whether the coroners’ rolls might look different without that wrinkle.

At any rate, this is an excellent, scholarly but accessible study for those interested in knowing more about life in the late Middle Ages. Recommended for the curious.

[Alger Smythe-Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book assigned for an undergraduate history class that I picked up with dread and read with increasing interest, I have returned to the book several times. My primary hesitation as a professional historian is that Hanawalt argues that our view of medieval family life is drawn from too little information, but relies heavily upon English coroner's records. My experience with these records is that there is as much information buried in those records as is revealed, after all a great deal of a community's respectability relied upon hiding dirt.
But Hanawalt's central thesis dismantling of the myth of extended family and the general arc of improving wealth and diet is more than amply supported by the evidence. A rare readable classic of social history.

[Dan Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely interesting book. This isn't a story with a narrative, but a review of village life for English peasants in the 1300s-1400s. It's mostly just interesting to learn what we do know about their lives. But for me it dispelled a lot of myths that we are told about medieval times and what was/wasn't wrong with them and where we all come from. It touches on everything from the lives of women (their roles were critically important and were recognized as such) to how peasants earned their daily bread.

I also just finished a book about Russian history so it was interesting to compare/contrast a little bit what peasants were like in both countries. All I can say is that we are blessed because of our English heritage. For one thing Russian serfs really were living in communes into the 20th century while English peasants of the 1300s were primarily focused on increasing the family wealth and passing it on to their heirs. The rule of law was already a thing for English peasants.

So, while this isn't a gripping thriller but more a review of common village and family life, it is worth the read.

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book a few years ago when I was undertaking research for an earlier novel, The Brewer’s Tale and remember being so impressed with it. Returning to it again (as I am also returning to the Middle Ages with my next book – only a slightly earlier period), I was once more struck not only by the lucidity and depth and breadth of research, but by the astute observations Hanawalt makes, observations always backed by evidence. Where there is little or none, Hanawalt also points this out and alerts her reader to the fact. But what makes this book so exceptional is its accessibility and readability. It is a joy to read and lose oneself in.

Instead of focussing, as so much history has, on the nobility or royalty or even religious bodies and thus powerbrokers of a particular country or culture (mainly because that’s about and for whom records were kept), The Ties That Bound chooses instead, as Hanawalt puts it, to “enter the doors of the peasant’s house” and give voice to those who didn’t have one. Choosing the family and its material environment as her foundation, Hanawalt investigates how, why and when families survived in the Middle Ages (she uses the fourteenth century as a rough framework), focussing on their working patterns (and so the medieval economy as centred around family, landholdings, agriculture and industry), marriage, childbirth, childhood, adolescence, godparents, household sizes, their structures – in terms of people as well as houses and land worked - sickness, death, neigbourhoods, manorial allegiance, gilds, village life, festivals, weather, war, and conflict and examines the impact all of these had on the day to day living of the average person in England over this period. She also addresses the dramatic changes that occurred following the Black Death in 1348-49.

Using coroners’ rolls (among other and local records) to examine patterns of accidental death as well as homicides etc. she is able to cleverly contest and even overturn earlier findings and sentimental assumptions about those who lived in the Middle Ages. Whereas other historians have often sought to demonstrate the differences to as well as distance from medieval family life and the modern one, Hanawalt is able to show that while there were, of course, differences, they were not as great as previously thought. After all, when all is said and done, we’re basically human whether we lived in the 1300s or now in the 21st century.

Barbara Tuchman notes in her wonderful book, A Distant Mirror, quoting Voltaire, “history doesn’t repeat itself, man [sic] does,” and this is something Hanawalt proves over and over - our capacity for great kindness, cruelty, generosity, greediness, violence, selfishness and love – towards each other whether family, kin or stranger, no matter what our class, education or earning power.

This is a terrific book for scholars, students and anyone with a passion for history and a readiness to know how the “other three-quarters” lived.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Pleasant to read, full of interesting information about the lives of medieval non-nobles. Gives a very thorough look at life across the social spectrum in medieval villages, excepting nobles, of course. Very different from other books of medieval history, which focus on what Hanawalt calls "the Bad Old Days" -- you know, nobody took baths, people were dying all the time, things were generally "unenlightened", medieval peasants as cavemen -- and really delivers up what the title says. I think through the analysis of coroner's rolls, Hanawalt neatly disproves the idea that medieval peasants weren't as attached to their children because of the high infant mortality rate.

Highly recommended. If I could give it six stars, I would.

[Emilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book review that I wrote for a British History class:

Barbara Hanawalt examines peasants and the peasant family in The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. This book rebukes the established ideas and beliefs about medieval people, by laypeople and by scholars. Two of the issues that she raises in the introduction are how varying historians have viewed the peasant family from viewing the peasant family as extended families living in one household, or peasant families as the conjugal or nuclear family. Hanawalt finds the truth somewhere in between these two extremes, with her argument falling towards the latter view, although she explores the complex relationship between family and community. Her book provides new insight into the lives of the medieval peasants, and to come to a new understanding of what their world may have been like.
Hanawalt acknowledges the problems of past studies on medieval people, especially peasants. She notes that historians and scholars have not fully studied the English medieval peasant, their research was flawed, or they were viewing medieval peasants from a modern perspective, thus doing them an injustice (9-10).While much information can be gleaned from manorial court rolls, she states that previous historians and scholars have overlooked sources such as archaeology, wills, and coroner’s rolls. Hanawalt uses these sources, especially the coroner’s rolls, in her analysis of peasants and peasant families, and all of her conclusions on peasants arise predominately from these documents. She also cites the influence of anthropological research methods in her acknowledgements. While the coroner’s rolls are morbid, they do provide much insight into the everyday life of peasants, and the demise and death of peasants, as well. She states that they are like “a very succinct verbal snapshot of life” (viii).
Hanawalt uses the unit of a family to understand how peasants lived in Medieval England. She begins with defining what a peasant and family were during the medieval era. Her premise is that, “medieval English peasant families were not exactly like our own, but they were also not extended, full of holes, porous, or solely centered on the community” (9). She shows how the family was the most important unit in the economy, especially in the chapter on inheritance. According to Hanawalt’s research of wills, it was important for the peasants to keep land and other possessions within the family, “Although customs varied from manor to manor, the strong sentiment that property should descend to the person with the closest blood tie remained firm” (73). Again, she is illuminating the importance of the nuclear family through inheritance and wills.
Hanawalt discusses peasant homes and their land and the village and other surroundings through the use of archaeological evidence, as well as other sources. One of the most fascinating incidents from the coroner’s rolls is that of a young girl being mauled by a bear that made its way up to the second floor of an inn (38-39). From this incident, Hanawalt is able to show that some two story homes did exist, although they were rare. She also outlines what she can glean about their diets, and other mundane aspects of everyday life, such as how archaeological evidence shows that the “floors” of the home were swept often (41). While this section on the “material world” is very interesting, it does not fit in wholly to Hanawalt’s overall argument. It sets up the peasant world before venturing into social and economic issues, and thus reaching Hanawalt’s argument.
Hanawalt goes into a discussion of the family members, and various life stages of the medieval peasant. The family was the economic unit in Medieval England, and by exploring each role of the family, she is able to show how important members were to the family economy. Even children contributed to the family economy. In the chapters on stages of life, many of these center around inheritance, especially the chapters on “Growing Up and Getting Married” and “Widowhood.” Interestingly enough, according to Hanawalt and an old proverb, widows and their children were able to survive the death of a husband and father, but the reverse was not true (220). The chapter on widowhood shows how community and the family were both simultaneously important to the peasant family. Women were able to inherit land and other possessions when their husbands died, thus showing the importance of kinship and family, but women also had a new role in the community.
In the last section, she devotes her analysis to the importance of community, and whether community or extended family was more important than the conjugal or nuclear family. She also discusses ways in which the community took care of its members, such as in the case of orphans or the sick, and the emotional bonds between neighbors and kin. In this final chapter, Hanawalts states that community ties and family ties were both important,
Community could provide only a portion of the material and emotional needs of an individual. While important to the medieval peasant, it was rather limited as a surrogate for family. The argument of Shorter and Ariès suffers from a basic fallacy, namely, that humans have only a finite ability to form emotional bonds….In traditional society, these authors argue, these ties were with the community, and in the modern period they shifted over to family. Humans, however, form a variety of emotional bonds that vary somewhat with the circumstances. A peasant’s ties with his neighbors, while emotional, were of a very different sort from those with family…(266)
While Hanawalt spends most of her book on the family itself and how it functioned as a unit, these two chapters show the importance of community in relation to the family itself. These two chapters work well at the end of the book. They serve to tie together the points that Hanawalt raises in her introduction.
Hanawalt focuses primarily on the latter years of the Middle Ages, predominately the 14th and 15th centuries. She contrasts between the era before the plague and after the plague, and how the plague affected peasants, their habits, and their family life, most notably in the ways in which community and family life changed, “The plague and other diseases took their toll of the community in more than numbers of dead. Although family units tended to regroup fairly quickly, with more distant kin taking the place of family who died, they did not have the same socialization into the community that the former tenants had, the mutual cooperation and community cohesion that had been built on generations of interactions and trust” (266). The plague was devastating to the medieval peasant family, but the nuclear or conjugal family was able to stay intact, although community appears to have become less important, due to the extreme death rate.
Hanawalt’s conclusion is that the medieval family is not similar to the modern family, as other historians have concluded, but they aren’t radically different either. Instead medieval peasants and the peasant family were more complex than they have been portrayed by other historians. Even through the changes in the later middle ages, with the devastation of the plague, Hanawalt states, “the peasant family remained much the same throughout these two centuries of cataclysmic changes and, moreover, that the family was able to maintain its basic structure” (3). In some ways, Hanawalt’s work is a critique on other scholarly works on the peasant and medieval life. Even in the epilogue, she criticizes how other historians have viewed the medieval peasant,
Historians are so dedicated to showing change over time and revolutionary breaks with the past that they often overlook historical behavior that does not change radically. Historians are also prone to make implicit value judgements about the past, looking back at earlier times with nostalgia for lost innocence or, alternatively, seeing in the past the horrors of a benighted time from which we modern people have fortunately escaped. Neither approach does justice to the lives of our peasant ancestors. We are not entirely like them, but they are not alien to use even though we are separated from them by five hundred years. (268)

Her epilogue is short, and does not conclude with a multitude of answers. Instead, she seems to want to disprove commonly held beliefs on peasant life in the Middle Ages. Though Hanawalt does delve deeply into the primary sources she is drawing conclusions from, she realizes that there will probably never be a complete story of the medieval peasant family, although she tries her best to present a more accurate representation of peasant life in the Middle Ages, by studying and analyzing how peasant families actually functioned.

[Evan Þ. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this wealth of details and vignettes, both as an amateur historian, avid reader, and an amateur writer who loves quasi-medieval settings from all three angles. The picture is somewhat surprising, both in the setting (did you know that villages often had sunken streets, from people fertilizing their garden plots over generations?) and the family life itself (did you know that English peasants usually lived as nuclear families, with relatives in other houses either next door or elsewhere in the village?) and the circumstances (did you know that peasants had to pay a death tax of the best two beasts from the deceased's property?). I only wish it was more comprehensive. In part, I suppose I need to read more - but in another big part, Hanawalt says, that's from a lack of sources. Most of this book was due to new social history techniques prompting people to extrapolate from details such as assault cases and coroner's records; huge new insights will probably require yet another breakthrough.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richly textured work on English peasants' households and community. Gives one a much better sense of what that world felt and looked like than most (the description of houses and concrete work tasks and food reminded me above all of Braudel, and that's a big compliment).

My only disagreement was identifying the family with biological reproduction and subsistence activities. Doing so might be fine (though I still think ultimately incorrect) if one also admits that there is a family ideology superimposed on top of those base activities, but Hanawalt doesn't tend to do so. Nevertheless, I completely agree with Hanawalt in her critique of Shorter and Stone that it's silly to assume that people can only hold one form of primary identification/affection (community or family), but that people always hold multiple at once.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another nonfiction book but easier for me to rate. This is pretty slow. But also full of interesting and sometimes amusing details and anecdotes about the lives of medieval peasants taken from the research. It was pretty robust and persuasive and I just loved the author basically shitting on other historians.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read. It gives a very detailed and intimate look into the lives, joys, and struggles of medieval peasants, and brings the whole community to life in a way that more "conventional" histories do not. The use of coroners' records to fill in the mundane records of peasant life was genius, and sometimes very grim and sad (so many babies got accidentally burned!)

[William Guerrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the writing is often dry (as it typically is in academic histories) and arguably the author puts too much emphasis on coroners' inquests, this broad look at peasant families in medieval England is interesting and well worth the effort required to get through it.

[Rev · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed it but it is a rather dense text, so if you're unaccustomed to reading history texts more geared to data sets and written analysis of those data sets, you might not get as much out of it. Still, it's a fascinating look into the lives of peasant families.

[Kumsal Obuz · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was repetitive here and there with the same examples used in different chapters

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't get to finish the last chapter because I had to return it to the library, but this was a great book.

[George Foord · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well researched book but it's not the easiest to read, more of a source book

[Emma Clemons]

No rating/ for school

[Jordan Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a weird window into past life! just like us but also not like us at all...creative use of sources pulling from literature and city/church records

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too academic for my layman's knowledge, but if I ever write a medieval his-fic, I will definitely come back to this.

[Kevin Gerken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting to use coroner’s records to paint a picture of medieval peasant life

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meticulous look at peasant life in the 14th and 15th century. With rigorous attention to what sources point to what -- which can get just a touch ghoulish, because one major source of information is inquests, describing what people were doing at the time of their deaths, and how the corpse came to be found.

It brushes on all sorts of subjects in the course of working things through. Cottages were commonly rebuilt every generation or so; an old man or woman who had given control of the lands to a child still lived in a separate cottage when at all possible. Food was commonly part of your wages at the beginning -- even for people who taught at colleges -- but the plague and famine in the middle, which produced both an abundance of available land and a scarcity of labor, resulted in laborers who demanded their wages in cash, and didn't like yearly contracts. The poor, the middling, and the prosperous peasant, the last of which usually monopolized the village offices as well. Kinship and inheritance -- the families of this era were clearly nuclear and only seldom extended farther. Labor for the man, the woman, and the children; boys joined in men's labor later than girls did woman's, but they were kept busy as adolescents on jobs requiring less strength. The stages of life, where, yes, they knew the children were children and teenagers were not quite adults. And the bonds of community and friendship.

[Princess Pepperdoodle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're looking for a book about the lives of medieval English peasants, this is one of the best books around that I've found. She uses contemporary coroner’s records (which is a tad morbid, but also humanizes the people she’s describing) and archeological research. She presents her findings in a nicely organized way, by stages of life. She includes a lot of subjects and types of people who have often been ignored. You get neither “nasty, brutish, and short”, nor a pastoral fantasy. Instead, the world she’s describing sound as rounded and likely as more modern peasant communities around the world.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I was completely intrigued by the serf/peasant system in the Middle Ages and realized through reading this that I knew little to nothing about it and my preconcieved and generic notions were almost all wrong. This book depicted peasants in a totally different light than I had ever seen them. Really interesting book with great attention to detail.

[Annemarie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look at medieval peasant life in England as reconstructed through coroner's reports and death records. For example, Hanawalt concludes that houses in medieval times sometimes had two stories because of an account of a little girl mauled by a bear who climbed up the stairs to her bedroom. Sometimes dry, but the conclusions are fascinating

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book takes a very interesting approach. It uses court and manor rolls to flesh-out our understanding of life in the middle ages. I only wish it included a bit more detail. We may know that some peasants could afford tile roofs because we know some tile pieces fell on people's heads. We just don't know the outcome of the poor person upon whose head the tile fell!

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting. I learned quite a bit about medieval English peasants that I had never thought of before. I can certainly see how a lot of this information has made its way into documentaries about the time period though. Definitely a bit dry, but the audience is not lay people so that's to be expected.

[Ess Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable reconstruction of peasant life in medieval England. I ADORE her use of accidental death records as historical evidence. I know that sounds a bit grim, but it works. I am still on the fence as to whether I buy her take on family structure (core vs. stem), but that is a minor quibble in an otherwise solid bit of scholarship.

[Sonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very informative and creative in that the author used criminal and death records to find historical data. In looking at coroner's records, we are able to see more of the "everyday" people in medieval society.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally enjoy histories which attempt to bridge the gap between our lives and those of people of other times and places. Hanawalt does so for the European middle ages, emphasizing the similarities.

[Hannah]

This is an amazing book! Really well researched, and easy to read. Challenging to so many of my preconceptions about medieval peasants.

[Judy Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good introduction to medieval social history in England. I really fell in love with her writing while I was studying medieval history in college.