Judith M. Bennett

Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800

Highlights the important minority of women who never married and addresses the critical matter of differences among women from the perspective of marital status.

Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families From Medieval Village Court Rolls

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

WRITING FORNICATION: MEDIEVAL LEYRWITE AND ITS HISTORIANS

Leyrwite was a fine for fornication levied on the bondwomen of many medieval English manors. This essay traces the distinctive chronological history of leyrwite (it flourished especially c . 1250–1350), its regional distribution (leyrwite was levied only in England and only in some regions of England), its socio-economic implications (leyrwite was directed especially at the poor and more at bastardy than fornication) and, most of all, the significance of its focus on women (leyrwite served as one means of regulating poor women and their families).

The Curse of the Plowman

This essay suggests that the figure of the plowman in late medieval literature has beguiled scholars into misunderstanding the medieval peasantry. For literary critics, the plowman genre has encouraged a limited, canon-dominated approach to the cultural remains of late medieval peasants. For historians, the figure of the plowman has flattened the medieval peasantry into a single class and a single (male) gender.

The Tie that Binds: Peasant Marriages and Families in Late Medieval England

The Tie that Binds: Peasant Marriages and Families in Late Medieval England On the last day of May 13 19, Henry Kroyl senior attended his manorial court at Brigstock, Northamptonshire, and transferred a semi-virgate of land to his son Henry Kroyl junior and his sons intended wife, Agnes, the daughter of Robert Penifader. At the same session, the younger Kroyl endowed his bride with a small house, an adjoining yard, and six rods of land. Because the marriage that lay behind these transactions united the children of two prominent villagers, the Brigstock records contain nearly 2,000 references to the activities of Kroyl junior, Agnes Penifader, and the members of their immediate families. By using these legal proceedings to reconstruct the social spheres of the Kroyls and Penifaders, this article examines how this marital union changed the social networks of the principals, their parents, and their siblings.1 Medieval marriage was both a private matter and a public institution. Although it technically required only the couples consent, it usually involved the assistance of parents, the participation of neighbors, and the approval of administrators. Marriage disintegrated old families by removing members to create a new family, but it also forged human links that could strengthen social

Two Women and their Monumental Brass, c. 1480

Abstract In the late 15th century, a monumental brass was laid in the church at Etchingham (East Sussex) to the memory of two never-married women, Elizabeth Etchingham, who died in 1452, and Agnes Oxenbridge, who died in 1480. This article investigates the possible social meanings of their brass, with a particular eye to Alan Brays recent interpretations of other funeral monuments dedicated to same-sex couples.

Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge

Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge are remembered in a modest memorial brass (figure 9.1) on the floor of a side aisle in a small parish church deep in the Sussex weald.1 Laid in the late fifteenth century, the brass shows the two women turned towards each other. Elizabeth Etchingham, on the left, is depicted with loose hair flowing down to her hips. Agnes Oxenbridge, on the right, is considerably larger than Elizabeth, and her hair is tightly coifed, but not covered. They are identically dressed. A Latin inscription under Elizabeth Etchingham tells us that she, first-born daughter of Thomas and Margaret Etchingham, died on December 3, 1452. A similar text under Agnes Oxenbridge identifies her as the daughter of Robert Oxenbridge, gives her date of death as August 4, 1480, and solicits God’s mercy on behalf of both women.2

Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague

In this book, Judith Bennett addresses the gap in our knowledge of medieval country women by examining how their lives differed from those of rural men. Drawing on her study of an English manor in the early-fourteenth century, she finds that rural women were severely restricted in their public roles and rights primarily because of their household status as dependents of their husbands, rather than because of a notion of female inferiority. Adolescent women and widows, by virtue of their unmarried status, enjoyed greater legal and public freedom than did their married counterparts.