Barbara A. Hanawalt

Reading the Lives of the Illiterate: London's Poor

In writing medieval social and cultural history I have studied groups of people who, for the most part, could not read or write: peasants, criminals, children, and women. In this article, I have taken a difficult group of illiterates to read, the poor of medieval London. Even among those people in the Middle Ages who could write, recording personal experiences was extremely rare. Communication in the Middle Ages was largely oral and only when something went wrong and came into courts or when someone had the foresight to have an agreement written down do we have a record of these people. As in my other studies of the Middle Ages I have used a variety of legal records that informed me about those instances when recourse to law was necessary. The scraps of information in court records yield an odd picture of the world. The information is fragmented and people usually appear with no social context, no family history, and no subsequent appearance. Economic, social, and cultural historians confront the problem of establishing narratives, evoking personal experiences, and trying to find broader patterns and trends using the records of manor courts, tax lists, court rolls and books, appeals, notary registers, wills, miracle stories, and a number of other official or unofficial documents. While the textual evidence of the literate is articulate, reading the lives of the illiterate in medieval records is a challenge, but it is one that none of us engaged in archival research is willing to forgo. How do we know about these people, speaking their vernacular and regional languages, whose words are trans lated into official Latin? Their voices are filtered through legal formulas of testi mony, questions by inquisitors, and distortions by those who are recording the information itself. It is the sense of solving mysteries that keeps researchers going back to the archives for tedious, long days. It is the hope of finding some insight into the lived life experience, the material environment or the economy, and peo ples ways of coping with their society. The methods that a researcher might employ in reading these voluminous rec ords are numerous. In some cases, property disputes in particular, it is possible to follow a case through its various permutations until it either drops from the record or is resolved. Scholars have been very clever in following families through the records, at the royal, regional, and even village level. But some records are repetitious and need a quantitative approach to make sense of them. One peasant does not illustrate a village experience, nor does one criminal describe the under world, nor does one woman who makes a success of business make a class of female entrepreneurs. But sometimes the cases are very full and many voices are present and can be analyzed. I intend to experiment here with a number of dif