The Later Medieval English Urban Household (original) (raw)
A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700
2017
This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family’s investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence.
Home Work: The Bourgeois Wife in Later Medieval England
Women and Work in Premodern Europe, 2018
Though there is now a fairly extensive scholarship on the lives of medieval women and particular attention has been paid to women’s work, this has conventionally been understood in rather narrow terms. This present chapter seeks to move beyond an exploration of paid employment or the public economy. It seeks rather to offer a holistic analysis of the activities of the medieval bourgeois housewife. Here a whole range of activities necessary for the effective functioning of the home as both an emotional and an economic entity are seen as integral to the role of the bourgeois wife. She was simultaneously wife, sexual partner, mother, domestic manager, and economic partner. She it was who directed the female servants, supervised in her husband’s absence, ensured meals were cooked, floors cleaned, utensils washed, children comforted and clothed, guest catered for, and husbands kept emotionally and sexually satisfied. The very success of the household and the family trade depended or her working in partnership with her husband, but whilst he may have been the public face of the family business, it is she who made the family home.
invite us to explore the language, ideology, architecture, and geography of medieval English women and men to determine what home and household signified in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
For the house her self and one servant': Family and Household in Late Seventeenth-century London
The London Journal, 2009
The 1695 returns for the marriage duty tax provide a unique opportunity to investigate the composition of London's domestic groups. Traditional schemes for the analysis of the early modern family and household fail to capture the complexities of metropolitan living, and a 'London-specifi c' methodology is outlined for use in the returns' classifi cation. Application of this scheme to returns from two contrasting areas of London, a cluster of wealthy city-centre parishes and a poorer suburban precinct, reveals a series of structural differences in their families and households that are attributable to the wealth and social status of their respective populations. However, some aspects of the domestic experience within the two areas are more comparable than previous accounts would suggest.
Space and Gender in the Later Medieval English House
This article uses “The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband,” a late fifteenth-century text that associates men with the outdoors and women with the home and the domestic, as a springboard for a comparative analysis of rural and urban housing to explore questions concerning the gender division of space over the course of the English later Middle Ages. The article questions the value of rigid models of gender difference that both normative texts and numbers of modern scholars propose. Drawing upon extant late medieval probate inventories and archaeological evidence, it explores rather different cultural norms between peasant and bourgeois society as reflected in the physical fabric and furnishings of homes. It further considers differences between different levels of society and over time. The article advocates an interdisciplinary methodology and the exploitation of narrative sources, literary or otherwise, to interrogate social practice and the meanings of space.
Families and Households in Early Modern London, 1550–1640
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016
In October 1585, Isaac Kendall, a young man in his mid-twenties, lay sick at the house of his former master and present employer, Cornelius Nealman, a free denizen and Stationer, in the inner-city parish of St Mildred Bread Street. From the depositions made in a lawsuit over the young man's will, we learn that he lay in an upstairs chamber over the kitchen, looked after by a succession of older women neighbours, while downstairs the business of family life went on. The rector of the parish and members of Kendall's family came to see him and were conducted upstairs to his bedside. On the evening of the night Kendall died, the family sat at supper at a table in the kitchen, and afterwards around the fire, parents, children, and neighbours who had dropped in to see how Kendall was doing. This glimpse of neighbourly sociability reveals something of the material culture and domestic practices of a middling London household in the later sixteenth century. The Nealmans occupied a house with several rooms, used for distinct functions, though informal family life focused on the kitchen. Sickness, nursing care, and death took place in the home. Family and household membership, while not fully delineated, are indicated: the household group included employees as well as the nuclear family, and the relationship between former apprentice and master was, in this case, warmer than that between Kendall and his siblings. The household was not an isolated unit, but enmeshed in a web of neighbourly and parish relationships. 1 But this narrative also reminds us that domestic culture and material life are shaped by many factors: household size and composition, location in space and time, and the obvious variables of occupation and economic status. The population of sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century London was growing rapidly and the size and shape of the metropolis were changing; settlement density increased, property values rose, and houses were built, rebuilt, and altered to meet new needs and new patterns of living. Economic change was also dramatic, as overseas trade extended, new industries developed alongside traditional ones, and the range of services provided for and by Londoners expanded. Patterns of work changed too, as the guilds' control of economic activity weakened, and casual employment and wage labour increased, and probably employment outside the home. Standards of living were under stress as prices rose far faster than wages, and the 1590s saw widespread hardship and some unrest in the capital. But at the same time many individuals profited from 1 London Metropolitan Archives [LMA], DL/C/B/046/MS09585 (Deposition books, testamentary causes, 1581-93), ff. 67v-75v. Not all details of the case are given, but it appears that Kendall's siblings challenged his will, in which he left all his goods to his former master, Nealman. The depositions show that Kendall had made his will (LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/12B, f. 115) some 18 months earlier, in good health, and was given every opportunity to alter it on his deathbed but refused to do so. the expansion of overseas and inland trade, and some of this wealth trickled down: London became a centre for new consumer goods, services, information, and entertainment. 2 Family and household, at the centre of London society, were undoubtedly affected by the social and economic transformations of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but they also resisted change. Patterns of living and household composition probably became more diverse, but the cycle of family formation and reproduction continued and the institution remained recognisably the same. Individual families and households inevitably change over time, expanding with new members, replacing or closing ranks after departing ones, accommodating the changing age and roles of individuals; they can adjust to external change as well. It is telling too that 'family' and 'household' are somewhat ambiguous terms in early modern usage, resisting hard and fast definition. The statistician John Graunt, discussing the demography of London in 1662, supposed that 'there were about eight Persons in a Family, one with another, viz. the Man, and his Wife, three Children, and three Servants, or Lodgers'. 3 He thus blurs the (modern) distinctions between the conjugal family of parents and children, the larger household which includes dependents such as servants and apprentices as well, and the looser group, or 'houseful', which includes lodgers and possibly other independent individuals who happen to live in the same house. 4 This essay will explore family and household, in their changing and overlapping configurations, in London between around 1550 and 1640, beginning with the role of migration in shaping London's population and continuing with the formation of family and household and their setting in a wider neighbourhood. Migration and London's population London's population in the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries comprised a mixture of London-born and migrants, with the latter including both recent and long-settled immigrants, coming from provincial agricultural backgrounds, market towns, and continental towns and cities. Probably a majority of the adult population had been born outside London, though they may have had connections in the capital that helped them to settle there, while mechanisms such as apprenticeship, service, and guild membership helped to integrate and assimilate at least some of the new arrivals and teach them how to live in the metropolis. Citizens' children may have had some advantages, but migrant origin was no bar to success in the city. Except for some of the alien immigrants, membership of the Church of England and subjection to its rules and practices was universal. 2 See Bibliography for works on early modern London's economy and society. 3 John Graunt, Natural and political observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662), p. 59. young draper, six weeks after Rowe's death in 1547. 67 Husbands often foresaw that their widows might remarry; some in effect wished them well, while others sought to ensure that their wealth should not fall into another man's hands, strictly limiting the assets that a widow could keep if she remarried, or seeking to protect their children's inheritance. 68 Widowers and the widows of citizen craftsmen had the best prospects of remarriage, while poorer and older widows were more likely to remain single; widows' remarriage also seems to have declined over the seventeenth century. 69 Either party might bring children to the second marriage, creating a complex blend of relationships. Dorothy Robotom brought six children from her first marriage to her second, and probably five children from the first marriage and one from the second to her third marriage. 70 Nehemiah Wallington's father had several children living when he remarried, and his second and third wives, both widows, each had two children already. One of these stepbrothers became a close friend of young Nehemiah's, and in later life he refers to his second stepmother as 'my Mother'. 71 It was indeed common to use simple terms like mother, brother, and sister for step-and half-relations and in-laws, perhaps implying a similar emotional relationship, but at least indicating the roles individuals were expected to occupy. On the other hand, it was not very common for households to include adults of two generations, 72 though certainly cases are known, as for instance the family of John Stow the chronicler, where John's widowed mother lived with another son, Thomas, and his wife, the cause of much domestic and familial friction. 73 Widows of independent means might head households, though predictably they were in the minority. Thirty-one of forty households in the parish of St Mary Colechurch in 1574 were headed by a married couple, two by women, and seven by unmarried men, who probably included some widowers. The women householders were both titled 'Mrs'; one was responsible for four other communicants, the other only for herself and her manservant, though either might have had under-age children. 'understanding that Isaac Kendall was sick by reason that [Marchant's] mother in law named Emma Tompson did keep him in his sickness went to him the said testator to see how he did'; Jane Marchant, his wife, 'came to the house of Mr Cornelius Nealman at about 9 o'clock at night to see how the said testator and her mother being the said testator's keeper, did'. Emma Tompson testified to the 'common voice' of the parish 'that Mr Cornelius is a free denizen and that the testator had been his prentice and was out of his years at Michaelmas last'. John and Jane Marchant went home 'and the next morning they heard say that the said testator was dead'. 97 The other deponents in the case, the scrivener who wrote the will, his apprentices, and the parish minister, made their contribution to the case, but it was the neighbours whose testimony illuminates Nealman's household and locates it in the community. Neighbours were important witnesses to good character and to misdemeanour, as well as to matters of fact and common report. Cases heard before the church courts, whether they concerned sexual transgression, slander, testamentary dispute, or ecclesiastical censure, illuminate the extent of interest in and knowledge of neighbours' affairs. 98 Londoners lived part of their domestic lives on the streets, or at least the front step, but there were few guarantees of privacy anywhere. London houses were closely packed, often subdivided in ad hoc ways, and structurally porous: neighbours overlooked each other's yards and premises, overheard conversations, and observed interactions through cracks and loopholes. 99 Proximity caused problems too, in disputes over shared amenities such as wells and privies, or the disposal of household waste. 100 Witness depositions in a dispute between the parish vestry of All Hallows Honey Lane and the...