Lloyd Bonfield

The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure. Essays presented to Peter Laslett on his seventieth birthday.

This collection of 15 studies by various authors concerns aspects of historical demography associated with the work of Peter Laslett. The essays range back in time as far as the fourteenth century and span topics as diverse but demonstrably interconnected as internal migration family structure and employment marriage and widowhood inheritance and remarriage the determinants of marital fertility maternal mortality and illegitimacy. Data sources include wills tithing lists manorial court rolls parish registers of various types and family reconstitutions as well as contemporary works and documents. The geographical focus is primarily on England but individual studies are concerned with Sweden and Italy.

The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied.1 The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure.2 This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been

Marriage, Property & the ‘Affective Family’

Discerning transitions in the emotional content of family relationships is a daunting task. In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 , Lawrence Stone has accepted the challenge exploiting ‘every possible type of evidence’ to detect an evolution in social attitudes. Reactions have generally been favorable; merits are thought to outweigh shortcomings. Even his most derisive critic concedes that the book is ‘important’ because it is of topical interest and attempts to illuminate an area of history which has previously remained obscure.

Law and individualism in medieval England

(1986). Law and individualism in medieval England. Social History: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 287-301.

Book Review: When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England

Potential reviewers ought to be cautious before agreeing to tackle volumes of collected essays. So many papers, so few words to expend. Moreover, the potential for offense to a colleague is greatly increased and may in fact be precisely correlated to the number of contributors whose works grace a collection. Worse still, one may commit the sin of omission; even one more economical with words than am I cannot do justice to nearly a score of essays in a scant fiftyscore words. The reviewer is particularly stretched in a volume that contains research papers produced by an impressive list of contributors with various interests and whose professional credentials range from lecturer in inorganic chemistry and industrial archeology to county archivist and philologist, with mere historians thrown in to boot. Unhappily, the task of the reviewer of this volume has not been facilitated by the production of an introduction that pulls it all together. Having sufficiently carped, let me say this is very useful work. Its subtitle, Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England, may sound pretentious, but in fact the volume delivers even more than it claims. Although produced under the auspices of Local Population Studies, When Death Us Do Part is not exclusively of interest to the local historian. Rather, it contains a veritable mother lode of bibliographical information, and the reader is provided with numerous critical essays drawing together the academic literature on a variety of topics of interest to social and economic (and legal) historians, from agricultural improvement to religious fervor and from literacy to geographic variation in consumption patterns, living arrangements, wealth, and the development of trades and industrial occupations. These essays are followed by research papers (though the specialist will recall that a number of the essays have seen the printed page elsewhere, albeit in different versions) focusing on particular topics that range from the words chosen by the will-maker or scrivener to grace the document’s preamble to an account of the economic careers of widows in two Oxfordshire towns. All topics are viewed through the documentary source that the volume’s inspirational force, Joan Thirsk, called “the faithful mirror”; the early modern will and the records that were produced by the probate process. It is a tribute to the force of Dr. Thirsk’s determination, and to the quality of her own scholarship, that these documents have been translated from the domain of the antiquarian to the obsession of the social and economic historian. The collection divides its essays (somewhat arbitrarily, methinks) into three parts. Six contributions deal with the probate records surveying the use of wills, probate inventories, and probate accounts. The second part focuses on more particularized research into (largely) wills and probate accounts; the third part hones in on (mostly) probate inventories. The essays are followed by four appendices: ecclesiastical canons on probate, selected sections from acts of parliament that governed will-making and probate and administration, an index of indices to probate courts published by the British Record Society, and finally some select documents that were produced in the process of probate. For the newcomer to probate records, both scholar and student, as a source for economic and social history, the essays in part 1 are very useful. Evan and Goose provide a critical analysis of the scholarship that has employed wills to shed light on a myriad of economic and social variables; Arkin, and then Overton, do the same for probate inventories; Erickson moves on to probate accounts. The initial two essays on probate jurisdiction are perhaps the least satisfactory. At times, they seem to overlap; while they may be useful to the novice in understanding the institu-

Book Review: Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England

patrilineage, their relationships with or through their mothers to male maternal kin broadened their networks beyond the exclusively male world that government and notarial documents portray. In sum, Chojnacki’s essays, as they have evolved over time, extend and correct the burgeoning gender scholarship of the last three decades. They do not naively celebrate the achievements of Renaissance women, as had historians from Burckhardt through the mid-1970s. Neither do they point out, as so many scholars have painstakingly and justifiably done, the overwhelming weight of patriarchal control over the lives of women in the pre-modern West. Rather, they show how the women of one social class (an admittedly privileged one, but for that reason one inclined to restrict the freedom of wives, widows, and daughters) asserted themselves in the social and economic roles that they were free to play and contributed markedly, even essentially, to the successful functioning of both society and state. In doing so, indeed, they helped create the remarkable coherence of Venetian society, which however much scholars deconstruct as “myth,” continues to present itself to our eyes. Finally and most impressively, Chojnacki shows how gender arrangements—women’s seeking autonomy, men’s adjusting their sexual lives to meet familial objectives, adolescents’ benefiting from counsel and assistance provided by matrilineal and patrilineal kin—supported and responded to the needs of the Renaissance state. In so doing, he puts the private and the public spheres, “separate” in so much recent historiography, back together again.