#historian: barbara a. hanawalt

[une-sanz-pluis]

Chronicles that were written after her trial and a ballad, "The Lament of the Duchess of Gloucester," have elements of the truth about her case, but their portrayal of this social and perhaps political rebel tells us about the mores of the period. The true story of Eleanor and her trial is not easy to establish. No trial transcript remains, and the chronicle accounts are biased and appeared long after the trial. There are few references to her in the Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, and the Privy Council. Eleanor seems to have been a convenient target in the struggle between Duke Humphrey and Cardinal Beaufort for control over Henry VI. Humphrey was a popular figure, but his power was not as great as that of the Cardinal. Eleanor, along with members of his household, was accused of necromancy, witchcraft, sorcery, and treason. Eleanor's high-handed manner and obvious enjoyment of her elevated status brought condemnation from Londoners.

Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Portraits of Outlaws, Felons, and Rebels in Late Medieval England”, British Outlaws of Literature and History (McFarland 2011)

[justadram]

I'm looking forward to seeing the last chapter and to see the one shot, later in the year.

From what i recall, you are a professor of medieval history for southern France, right? I was wondering, would you be able to recommend some good books or authors that write about the day to day life in the medieval period? And possibly some books or authors that write about the military aspect of the period (man at arms, knights etc) and also about castle construction?

I am! And while I'm happy to recommend some books, I also feel compelled to say I'm always leery of doing so. What do people actually want in a rec? Something engaging? Something easily digested? I'm not familiar with popular medieval history (it's not something I'd ever have reason to read) and academic history can be stuffy or even rather poorly written. But full of info!

Frances and Joseph Gies, husband and wife duo, are probably the best-selling historians of medieval history and they have a series of books that touch on a lot of what you're asking about.

Life in a Medieval Village

Life in a Medieval Castle

Life in a Medieval City

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages

The Knight in History

Also:

Anything published by Barbara Hanawalt or David Herlihy.

All of the above are pretty good reads, but there are some engaging medieval history books out there that aren't exactly what you're looking for. For sheer entertainment/informational value, I'll throw those out too. They tend to trend toward the weird because that's my jam:

Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: maybe the most famous and widely read book in medieval history, and this is precisely what I do, meaning southern French heresy. Heresy tends to be weird and this features a lot of weird cultural stuff and love affairs.

The Holy Greyhound, Jean-Claude Schmitt: 13th c. dog cult and the inquisitor attempting to root it out!

And then if you dip into Early Modern history, which people popularly lump in with medieval:

The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg: the most widely read microhistory of all time no doubt, this one is about a peasant interviewed by the Roman Inquisition about his unique cosmology. He believes the earth formed like cheese and the angels were the worms in the cheese.

The Great Cat Massacre, Darnton: this one is a collection of French cultural history essays, which includes the topic of fairy tales and eponymously, a workers' protest and "massacre" of the cats by apprenticed printers in Paris.

Immodest Acts, Judith Brown: focuses on the life of a nun in Renaissance Italy accused of being a lesbian.

The War of the Fists, Robert Davis: discusses worker culture in Venice and the factional violence carried out in mock battles for spectators on Venitian bridges.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt ★★★★☆

The peasantry cannot be considered a “lumpen” class, however, but can be broken down into three basic status groups within the class. As George Orwell observed at the conclusion of 1984, societies always group into high, low, and middle. While it had been commonplace to observe that some peasants had thirty acres compared to another group who had fifteen and still another group who may have had only one or two, it was the historian J. Ambrose Raftis and his students who discovered and explored in depth what the implications of the different status groups were. Through painstaking village and family reconstitutions, they, and now several other scholars, have investigated the variations in wealth, the domination of village power, the reliance on fellow villagers, marriage alliances, and a range of behavior that relates directly to the social status of the village family. It is now apparent that these status distinctions were much more significant than the differences between free and unfree (villein) peasants. Modern scholars have found that marriages between villein and free peasants and an active land market tended to obscure these old legal distinctions until the demise of serfdom in the fifteenth century made them irrelevant.

The wealthy peasants, who have sometimes been called primary villagers and even oligarchs, were wealthy in land and chattels, dominated village offices, ate well, and produced relatively large families. The secondary villagers were a numerous group who also had roots in the village, but they had less land and fewer chattels. In good times they could prosper, but to make ends meet they relied on a network of other villagers to aid them, They were respected in the village, but only occasionally held the coveted offices of village governance. Below this group were the cottars, or tertiary villagers. They had only a cottage and a few acres, and consequently they had to rely heavily on wage labor or some supplementary activity, such as thatching, in order to get by. Their standard of living was low, and few of their children survived.

[dwellordream]

“…Many parents of all classes sent their children away from home to work as servants or apprentices - only a small minority went into the church or to university. They were not quite so young as the Venetian author suggests, though. According to Barbara Hanawalt at Ohio State University, the aristocracy did occasionally dispatch their offspring at the age of seven, but most parents waved goodbye to them at about 14. Model letters and diaries in medieval schoolbooks indicate that leaving home was traumatic. "For all that was to me a pleasure when I was a child, from three years old to 10… while I was under my father and mother's keeping, be turned now to torments and pain," complains one boy in a letter given to pupils to translate into Latin. Illiterate servants had no means of communicating with their parents, and the difficulties of travel meant that even if children were only sent 20 miles (32 km) away they could feel completely isolated.

So why did this seemingly cruel system evolve? For the poor, there was an obvious financial incentive to rid the household of a mouth to feed. But parents did believe they were helping their children by sending them away, and the better off would save up to buy an apprenticeship. These typically lasted seven years, but they could go on for a decade. The longer the term, the cheaper it was - a sign that the Venetian visitor was correct to conclude that adolescents were a useful source of cheap labour for their masters. In 1350, the Black Death had reduced Europe's population by roughly half, so hired labour was expensive. The drop in the population, on the other hand, meant that food was cheap - so live-in labour made sense.

"There was a sense that your parents can teach you certain things, but you can learn other things and different things and more things if you get experience of being trained by someone else," says Jeremy Goldberg from the University of York. Perhaps it was also a way for parents to get rid of unruly teenagers. According to social historian Shulamith Shahar, it was thought easier for strangers to raise children - a belief that had some currency even in parts of Italy. The 14th Century Florentine merchant Paolo of Certaldo advised: "If you have a son who does nothing good… deliver him at once into the hands of a merchant who will send him to another country. Or send him yourself to one of your close friends... Nothing else can be done. While he remains with you, he will not mend his ways."

Many adolescents were contractually obliged to behave. In 1396, a contract between a young apprentice named Thomas and a Northampton brazier called John Hyndlee was witnessed by the mayor. Hyndlee took on the formal role of guardian and promised to give Thomas food, teach him his craft and not punish him too severely for mistakes. For his part, Thomas promised not to leave without permission, steal, gamble, visit prostitutes or marry. If he broke the contract, the term of his apprenticeship would be doubled to 14 years. A decade of celibacy was too much for many young men, and apprentices got a reputation for frequenting taverns and indulging in licentious behaviour. Perkyn, the protagonist of Chaucer's Cook's Tale, is an apprentice who is cast out after stealing from his master - he moves in with his friend and a prostitute. In 1517, the Mercers' guild complained that many of their apprentices "have greatly mysordered theymself", spending their masters' money on "harlotes… dyce, cardes and other unthrifty games".

In parts of Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia, a level of sexual contact between men and women in their late teens and early twenties was sanctioned. Although these traditions - known as "bundling" and "night courting" - were only described in the 19th Century, historians believe they date back to the Middle Ages. "The girl stays at home and a male of her age comes and meets her," says Colin Heywood from the University of Nottingham. "He's allowed to stay the night with her. He can even get into bed with her. But neither of them are allowed to take their clothes off - they're not allowed to do much beyond a bit of petting." Variants on the tradition required men to sleep on top of the bed coverings or the other side of a wooden board that was placed down the centre of the bed to separate the youngsters. It was not expected that this would necessarily lead to betrothal or marriage.

To some extent, young people policed their own sexuality. "If a girl gets a reputation of being rather too easy, then she will find something unpleasant left outside her house so that the whole village knows that she has a bad reputation," says Heywood. Young people also expressed their opinion of the moral conduct of elders, in traditions known as charivari or "rough music". If they disapproved of a marriage - perhaps because the husband beat his wife or was hen-pecked, or there was a big disparity in ages - the couple would be publicly shamed. A gang would parade around carrying effigies of their victims, banging pots and pans, blowing trumpets and possibly pulling the fur of cats to make them shriek (the German word is Katzenmusik). In France, Germany and Switzerland young people banded together in abbayes de jeunesse - "abbeys of misrule" - electing a "King of Youth" each year. "They came to the fore at a time like carnival, when the whole world was turned upside down," says Heywood. Unsurprisingly, things sometimes got out of hand. Philippe Aries describes how in Avignon the young people literally held the town to ransom on carnival day, since they "had the privilege of thrashing Jews and whores unless a ransom was paid".

In London, the different guilds divided into tribes and engaged in violent disputes. In 1339, fishmongers were involved in a series of major street battles with goldsmiths. But ironically, the apprentices with the worst reputation for violence belonged to the legal profession. These boys of the Bench had independent means and did not live under the watch of their masters. In the 15th and 16th Centuries, apprentice riots in London became more common, with the mob targeting foreigners including the Flemish and Lombards. On May Day in 1517, the call to riot was shouted out - "Prentices and clubs!" - and a night of looting and violence followed that shocked Tudor England. By this time, the city was swelling with apprentices, and the adult population was finding them more difficult to control, says Barbara Hanawalt. As early death from infectious disease became rarer the apprentices faced a long wait to take over from their masters. "You've got quite a number of young men who are in apprenticeships who have got no hope of getting a workshop and a business of their own," says Jeremy Goldberg. "You've got numbers of somewhat disillusioned and disenfranchised young men, who may be predisposed to challenging authority, because they have nothing invested in it."

How different were the young men and women of the Middle Ages from today's adolescents? It's hard to judge from the available information, says Goldberg. But many parents of 21st Century teenagers will nod their heads in recognition at St Bede's Eighth Century youths, who were "lean (even though they eat heartily), swift-footed, bold, irritable and active". They might also shed a tear over a rare collection of letters from the 16th Century, written by members of the Behaim family of Nuremberg and documented by Stephen Ozment. Michael Behaim was apprenticed to a merchant in Milan at the age of 12. In the 1520s, he wrote to his mother complaining that he wasn't being taught anything about trade or markets but was being made to sweep the floor. Perhaps more troubling for his parents, he also wrote about his fears of catching the plague. Another Behaim boy towards the end of the 16th Century wrote to his parents from school. Fourteen-year-old Friedrich moaned about the food, asked for goods to be sent to keep up appearances with his peers, and wondered who would do his laundry. His mother sent three shirts in a sack, with the warning that "they may still be a bit damp so you should hang them over a window for a while". Full of good advice, like mothers today, she added: "Use the sack for your dirty washing."

- William Kremer, “What medieval Europe did with its teenagers.”