RURAL FAMILIES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

An assessment of the rural family across a period extending from the early Middle Ages to the late Middle Ages inevitably presents not just a series of challenges but also a range of likely approaches. In order to examine the rural family across three quarters of a millennium, it seems appropriate, if not necessarily sensible, to divide the analysis between a number of facets of the medieval family, namely as domestic unit, as economic unit, and as a cultural unit. By so doing we will be able to move widely over shared agendas within a variety of studies across medieval Europe, engaging with historiographical traditions and grappling with analytical approaches to the family.

It is, broadly speaking, in discussion of family structure and demography, of economy and of culture, that the historiographical framing of the medieval family has been constructed. In that respect also, the history of the family has tended to follow the familiar lines of the general development of the discipline. Much of the work on the family in past time, and not just the medieval rural family, has been a product of broader discipline-wide developments, including the emergence of women’s history and gender history, and the close historical engagement with the agendas of the social sciences.1 Thus, sociological investigation of the family, consistent with the growth of a new social history in the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged an outpouring of work on family and household structures, much of it informed by work on other periods and by non-medievalists.2 While this avenue of research has never since been entirely closed off, in more recent years the history of the medieval family has also admitted a cultural turn that has witnessed the publication of work on, inter alia, the nature of domestic space, the representation of the family, and its symbolic reference.3 A good deal of this work is also heavily informed by research into the domestic economy, where discussion of, for instance, the role of women and children, treatment of the elderly, and the nature of charity all encourage a dialogue between subdisciplinary areas of research. Much of the research on the economy of the medieval family has in addition been the product of the investigation of issues ancillary to the family per se. Thus, for instance, discussion of land and its transfer in this period, a major theme of the economic history of the Middle Ages, has spawned a fair amount of refl ection on the ways in which families in this period responded to changes in land supply, availability of capital, and the shifts within their own domestic structure. In turn, such work has encouraged further reflection upon the domestic economy, its function, and its foundation.

The major theoretical foundations for the study of the family in earlier periods have also been established by the work of those whose own research has been located in other disciplines. Thus, writing on the economy of the family has drawn upon the work of economic anthropologists such as Boserup and Sahlins. It would, however, be inappropriate to suggest that such theoretical underpinnings enjoy a universal degree of relevance; “contemporary” economic modelling, such as that undertaken on early twentieth-century Russia by Chayanov, clearly has greater significance within some historical traditions than it has in others and it may be at the second stage, of exchange between historians working within historical traditions, that such approaches are shared.4

Within the body of historical work focused upon the family, we can identify two main traditions, the two quite often intersecting and signifi cantly informed by the work of the other. One of these strands is closely associated with an Annaliste approach, which has encouraged an investigation of the history of the family and its related topics, including the history of childhood, of age, of memory, and so on.5 The other main strand we might best identify as emerging from work on family and household, in terms of structures and their demographic consequences, notably work linked to the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Unlike the more disparate themes of an Annaliste tradition of histoire totale, the Cambridge Group project set a challenge for historians of the family working on different temporal and spatial contexts to test the extent of the nuclearization of the family. In this sense also the purpose was to place the history of the family upon a solid empirical footing and to reject some of the cosier, loosely ethnographic assumptions regarding the historical family that had persisted since at least the nineteenth century.6 Both strands have precipitated research on the history of the family in Europe and beyond; it is clear also, as we will have cause to discuss in what follows, that this work has given impetus to medieval historians, including those working on aspects of rural and agrarian history in the period.

The Rural Family

It is now a standard of the literature on family structure that the majority of domestic units were simple, often nuclear units, typically comprising no more than two generations of family members. Crucial, then, in the distinction between differing family forms, as discussed across periods and between regions, is the proportion of more or less complex family and household types. In no small part as a result of the research encouraged by Laslett et al. in the 1960s and 1970s, we can now explore instances of “typical” family forms, before also proceeding to consider their typicality. For the family, that is the co-habiting kin group, we can describe its principal features. Inevitably, in generalizing, we lose the particular and we will need, from time to time, to consider a variety of instances. If we begin with the nuclear family, we find its type perpetuated throughout medieval Europe. Wickham notes that, for the early Middle Ages, it is the nuclear family that is most typically represented in our documents, with relatively much less direct reference to more distant kin.7 In Catalonia, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, the predominant type of family grouping, judging from donations to ecclesiastical foundations, was nuclear, with recorded activity of single men, men and offspring, single women, single women and offspring, and parents, either acting alone or with their children, accounting for 88.6 per cent of all such recorded activity. Slightly more complex groupings were responsible for the remainder of this activity. While meaningful data on family structure are in relatively short supply for the early Middle Ages, ninth-century polyptychs offer us some reasonable sense of the average size of households, as on the estates of the abbey of Saint-Germain des Prés, where the mean size was 5.79 persons and the structure was typically simple. Listings of family units, as evidence for rentals and surveys, from the high Middle Ages offer us a fuller sense of this nuclear typicality. Thus, for example, in early fourteenth-century Greece, fiscal records, praktika, detail family membership and, though potentially difficult to interpret, do clearly suggest that the majority of families, between 50 percent and 75 percent, were nuclear in structure. Perhaps most obviously, the cadastral surveys of fifteenth-century Italy also suggest the preponderance of simple family and household structures, with 80.4 percent of households in the countryside around Florence and Arezzo composed of a single nucleus. Of families in the countryside, 51.2 percent were “entirely conjugal,” composed of parents and, potentially, their offspring. Smith has also questioned the extent to which thirteenth-century serf lists from England (Lincolnshire) reveal any great complexity of household structure, as it was once suggested they might.8

This is not to say, of course, that more complex family units did not exist in medieval Europe, for inevitably they did. Laterally extended and vertically extended families occur in most identifiable cohorts of family structure. In medieval England, at Kibworth Harcourt (Leicestershire), a surviving male overlap of three generations was rare, though it was relatively more common to find family units that included females of three generations. Homans, in an analysis that predates the systematic investigation of family forms in past society, offers work that is as rich in its detail as it is potentially problematic in its emphasis on extended familial structures. He suggests that both stem-families, where one heir is advantaged over his siblings, the latter choosing either to remain as unmarried members of the main family or to seek their fortunes elsewhere, and joint-families, where there is a distribution of resources amongst siblings, or male siblings, were to be found in thirteenth-century English villages.9 The proportion of extended family types varied across periods and across the region. There is some suggestion that, even within subregions, the proportions of extended family groups could differ quite significantly, as in early fourteenth-century Macedonia, where the proportion of, for instance, laterally extended family groups varied quite markedly between administrative districts or themes. Hammel notes similar distinctions for other Balkan households, his analysis of fourteenth-century listings of household structures from the estates of the Mount Athos monastery of Chilander suggesting a significant predominance of nuclear households, a feature that stands in contrast to later evidence for the joint family organization associated with the zadruga.10

If the family group, namely that of blood relations, varied significantly in its size and complexity, a further additional element of variety is evident in the household – that is, those living under the same roof.11 In most instances, the household and the family unit must have been coterminous, with identical membership, but difference did exist where servants, slaves, and retainers lived with the family. While servants in late medieval Tuscany were a small element of the population, they did have an impact upon the structure of a small number of households.12 Hardly suprisingly, the size and complexity of the household corresponded to relative wealth, though not to the extent that we should exclude the relatively humble from our considerations here. Amongst those that we might identify as elites living in the countryside, especially, of course, lay and religious households, there was, frequently, an evident complexity in their organization and considerable range in their size. While some of these, such as the società della torri and the alberghi, might best be identified as urban phenomena, gangs of dwellers resident within the households of the rich and powerful were not unknown to the countryside, as the domestic accounts of the great households indicate.13 At lower levels of society, a peasant elite might also have housed servants and the passing stranger, thereby extending their household for periods of time. The housing of servants in peasant households, as famuli, ancillae, or manipasti, is familiar from a number of sources across Europe. The relatively intermittent accommodation of strangers, extranei, is also familiar, and is sometimes associated with the extension of the household at significant moments in the agrarian calendar, especially at harvest time.

While we might inevitably focus our attention upon the immediate family and household, it is also important to recognize the significance of the wider familial group, which we might think of as a functionally extended family, kin, and wider lineage.14 Again, there are significant differences to identify here, not the least of which were determined by distinctions of wealth, mobility, and regional and local economies. We might also suspect that a strong cultural tie to kinship and blood relation either served to perpetuate such associations or was a reflection of their material significance. We will return to this in the final third of this chapter. For the moment we should note that, in certain rural contexts, individuals enjoyed the benefit of a wider kin group, often living within fairly close proximity though not within the same household. In other contexts, kin relationships might extend over significant geographical distance and might not easily be separated from other forms of collective identity, akin to clan, tribe, or economic grouping, as the knightly armorial clans in late medieval Poland illustrate. In fact, within economies where distance from the family hearth was a necessary feature of daily life, the emotional bonds of family were fi ercely maintained but the actual familial identities blurred. Amongst the Cathar shepherds of the Pyrenees, for example, bonds of brotherhood did not only exist between blood brothers.15 In other contexts, rural and village confraternities might well serve a similar function, offering an essentially non-familial grouping but one that was capable of replicating similar forms of familial support, including succor and education.16

The disparities described above can, in part, be explained by the variety of likely causative conditions that pertained across the period and the region. Age at marriage, for instance, inevitably helped to determine family size and structure, and was also a product of the same. While, as will be discussed further, it is impossible, in a homeostatic marriage system, to separate relativities of wealth from age at marriage, with a tendency for earlier marriage to be associated with wealthier families, historians have tended to distinguish between two dominant marriage patterns in Europe, and that especially based upon research on early modern and modern Europe. Most famously, J. Hajnal drew a distinction between northwest and southern European marriage patterns, sometimes referred to as, respectively, “European” and “non-European” marriage patterns.17 The distinctive features of these two regimes were, for a “European” regime, late marriage, as well a significant proportion of the population who never married, a high proportion of servants, and a significant proportion of households composed of a sole occupant. By contrast, a “non-European” regime was characterized by earlier marriage, no solitaries and servants, and an almost universal proportion of those who eventually married.

Without meaningful data on age at marriage it is all but impossible to identify the predominance of one or other regime in earlier centuries and across all parts of Europe.18 However, sufficient detailed information exists from parts of northern and southern Europe by the late Middle Ages to allow some meaningful distinction to be drawn. We might therefore identify a distinction between parts of late medieval England and northern Italy (Tuscany), with, apparently, a higher concentration of life-cycle service and later marriage evident in the former rather than in the latter. In southern Italy, there was even less evidence of life-cycle service than in Tuscany, and the likelihood that women would migrate from countryside to town in search of service work was comparatively remote.19 Elsewhere such movement of women into urban households was less a choice and more the result of force. In the late medieval Balkans, for instance, the rural populations of Bosnia and Herzegovina were plundered for slaves, and especially female slaves, to support households within the towns of the Adriatic. Thrown into slavery, these men and women lost the support of their own families and had to develop opportunity within their new and imposed domestic setting.20 By contrast, in late medieval England, there is especially strong evidence for the movement of young men and, above all, women from countryside to town in search of employment within urban households as servants, as studies of taxation records for York have shown.21

As Razi has attempted to show, different marriage patterns pertained, even within regional and local contexts, and were determined as much by relativities of wealth as they were by custom and perceived norms of behavior.22 While these are topics to which we will need to return later in this chapter, it is evident that a crucial determinant of familial structure was wealth. Relativity of wealth helps explain some of the distinctions across time, as Howell reminds us when she notes that the age structure of the family was determined, in no small part, by the age at which offspring left the family home, a departure in itself determined by alternative opportunities, including the labor market, relative to “domestic” opportunities, including inheritance and marriage.23 In medieval England, at Halesowen (Warwickshire), there was a direct and positive correlation between wealth and family size, the wealthiest “virgaters” tending to hold more land but also to live in a larger family groups.24 In early fifteenth-century Italy, wealth has also been identified as a close associate of family size, suggesting that “families in the ruling class had their own demographic characteristic.”25 And, it is, of course, clear that political and religious elites, with especially advantaged access to resources, were most likely to occupy large and complex households. Klapisch also clarifies this association by suggesting that wealth alone did not determine family size and structure, but that landed wealth was the crucial component.26


The Economy of the Rural Family

The family and household were also, inevitably, economic units. To some extent, and we identify this as a traditional view of the rural family and its economy, the family and the economy of the family might be considered coterminous. A Chayanovian view of the peasant family, for instance, places great store upon the capacity of the family to respond to its own needs in ways largely but not wholly consistent with a subsistence or self-sustaining economy.27 There is, as we might expect, good evidence for this close dependency of the rural family upon its own labor relative to a fairly fixed plot of land. In medieval England the concept of the terra unius familie, the land of and for a single villein family, was the bedrock of one form of seigneurial expectation of tenant land. Units of landholding, of 30 or 40 acres, were held by unfree tenants on the expectation of their capacity both to maintain the tenant family and to provide the lord with rent, in money, kind, and/or labor. This consonance of economic unit and family is also identified elsewhere.28

Within the family, we can find good evidence for a distribution of tasks partially determined by age and by gender. In medieval England, coroners’ rolls illustrate the dangers of domestic occupations but may also inform us, through frequency of death and injury relative to place of incident and identity of the victim, of the normal distinctions of such activity. Thus, for instance, accidents involving females were more likely to occur close to the family hearth than were the deaths of males. Unsurprisingly also the range of tasks was determined by age and capacity. While, for instance, children, especially girls, might be employed by their parents as nurses of their younger siblings, responsibility for other signifi cant facets of the domestic economy tended to reside with the adult members of the family. While children tended to be offered tasks consistent with their physical capacity, it is also the case that their training developed through their childhood in a manner intended to deliver them, as young adults, into the world of work. In fourteenth-century France, shepherd boys developed their range of skills as they matured, so that, by the age of about 14, they were largely equipped to meet the responsibilities of a shepherd’s life. In similar manner, the male offspring of rural artisans also developed their skills in apprenticeship as the carpenters, tilers, and smiths of the medieval village. It is also evident that, in addition to capacity and expertise, roles within the domestic economy were divided according to custom and the like. Changes in custom and developments in trading opportunities would also see opportunities for employment increase or decrease accordingly. Thus, brewing of ale by females, as part of a household economy, declined in the late Middle Ages as it gave way to commercial brewing dominated by men.29

It would, though, be incorrect to associate the family unit in the medieval countryside with any absolute self-sufficiency. It is unlikely that many, if any, rural families in the Middle Ages came close to a dependency that was based exclusively upon themselves. While it is reasonable to suppose that the domestic unit and its land-holding was the vital mainstay of most rural families in this period, it is also evident that rural families were, to varying degrees, drawn into economic dealing beyond their immediate domestic sphere. Obligations to lords and to the state, labor beyond the family, the sale of surplus produce through the market or through less formal exchange all had consequences, both advantageous and disadvantageous, for the between town and countryside, and while recognizably resident, at least in part, in the countryside was dependent upon commercial exchange and the market for the proper functioning of its economy. In fifteenth-century England, certain rural dwellers were also as much “urban” in that their main economic activity drew them into town and city. Aspiring merchants also aped their social superiors, not only by seeking marriages that placed them within their society, but also by purchasing residences in the countryside and channeling their profits into land and their rustic existence.30

This involvement in an economy that extended beyond the immediate domestic or familial unit is also evident in the employment of servants or the use of slaves, thereby extending the capacity of the simple biological unit of the family. It has already been noted, for instance, that households might be extended in their size and complexity at certain key moments of the agricultural year, as illustrated by complaints against the “illegal” housing of strangers who might then be employed, in competition with neighbors, as gleaners.31 An important distinction here is to be made between households where a significant part of the domestic economy involved paid labor, including live-in servants, and those households where this was not the case. In earlier periods and in certain parts of Europe in the later Middle Ages, we should also recognize the significance of slaves within and beyond the domestic rural economy. In most parts of Western Europe, between the tenth and twelfth centuries, slavery was subsumed within structures of feudal lordship that imposed various degrees of obligation and of freedom and unfreedom upon those who came increasingly to be seen as tenants rather than slaves. In such instances, slaves occupied land and households separate from their lords and masters, their impact on the lord’s domestic economy typically a product of their obligation and that, increasingly, in forms of rent.32

There were, of course, consequences arising from the economic relationship of household and work. The marriage patterns discussed earlier in this chapter had implications for the nature and functioning of domestic economies, as well as having a wider impact upon society and economy across the period. We tend to think of rural families as operating within a neo-local household formation system, sometimes referred to as a “peasant” or “niche” system, where opportunity for marriage is generally dependent upon the availability of land. In such systems relatives of wealth and landholding determine differences of age at marriage within particular social groups. Thus, in Halesowen (England) in the fourteenth century age at marriage appears to have been earlier for the relatively prosperous villagers, who also enjoyed extensive familial and wider kin networks, but was later for the poorer tenants. These poorer tenants were conceivably more likely to find themselves operating within a “proletarian” or “real-wages” household formation system, a system of relative displacement that stands in contrast to any view of the domestic economy focused upon the family. In such a system, those individuals who could not expect to gain significantly through familial association and above all through inheritance, could, for example, seek labor opportunities as a means of gathering the necessary resources prior to marriage. Instead, we come closer to an economy centered on the individual and his or her earning capacity relative to the labor market. Such difference in marriage and household formation systems had consequences for the family and/or households in other respects, notably in the employment of life-cycle servants, with delayed marriage as a by-product of their employment, while individuals might also use their employment to support their own family members.33

Establishing the relative significance of these household formation systems is far from straightforward, not least because individuals living within the same family and household might be participants in either system. This might especially be the case where a strict monogeniture advantaged one sibling while forcing the other siblings to seek their advantage elsewhere, precipitating both centrifugal and centripetal effects within the same domestic unit. The same would also be the case if the household was also home to life-cycle servants. In such an instance the life-cycle servant was a participant in one form of household formation system, essentially a “proletarian” or “real-wages” system, while other members of the household might be more appropriately seen as operating within a “peasant” or “niche” system. That said, historians have tended to explain the prevalence of one of the two systems relative to the other in terms of wealth, with wealthier rural families basing their marriage choices upon their landed resources and upon their capacity to accumulate land, chiefly through inheritance. In other contexts, families might exploit opportunities provided by institutions, including religious houses, in order to absorb non-inheriting family members.34

While the rural family might be other than self-sustaining in terms of labor, it also needed to engage, in economic terms, with individuals and institutions for a range of other reasons. Not the least of these was in its obligations. Lords, the Church, and the State were, to varying degrees, able to make demands upon the domestic unit in this period. This was especially the case where the family or household was directly associated with a block of landholding. Towards the close of the period the burgeoning nation state in Europe could direct its apparatus toward the individual, as systems of taxation on movable goods or head taxes illustrate, but in earlier periods landholding was typically the basis of obligation. In this respect, heads of households, as tenants, owed some element of their resource to others. Among rural elites this might include military service, while for peasants service would more likely be performed as labor. Rents in cash and kind, payments such as mortuary to the Church or death duties to the lord, had a similar impact upon the budget of the rural household.

Against such outgoings there existed opportunities to sell produce and particular skills. It was once assumed that few households in the period, be they religious houses, noble, or peasant, were involved in anything other than an economy founded on consumption – that is, the maintenance of anticipated needs rather than an enterprise more geared to profit. It is now argued that at all levels of society it is possible to detect those who looked to secure more than their consumption needs and, instead, employed their resources in ways capable of seeking profit. The domestic economy of the household, insofar as it generated any kind of surplus, also presented the opportunity for family and household to exploit that surplus, through either reinvestment or display. The purchase of household goods, the employment of labor, charitable donation, gestures of self-aggrandisement are all evident from this period, as families sought opportunities to employ whatever benefits their toils had brought them. One other surplus that families might enjoy was time; where free time independent of labor could be found, then a domestic culture might also be fostered.

The Culture of the Rural Family

The culture of the rural family also, of course, exhibited enormous variety in this period. Impossible as it is to trace every facet of household and family culture, in any period, we can at least identify a number of features redolent of the cultural investigation of the domestic space. We might begin by exploring the culture of the family group and the extent to which issues of family, kin, and relationships of blood were of central relevance to family members. Thus, for instance, as more than one historian has described, the familial regard for property is evidence both for the nature of the family economy and also for a sense of collective obligation and action. In ninth-century Brittany, for example, familial rights over land outstripped the ability of the individual to alienate family land without the consent of his or her kin. The same was also the case in fourteenth-century Greece, where the alienation of even small plots of land was subject to the agreement of the immediate family – that is, all those with actual claims upon the property.35 While we could find many similar instances throughout medieval Europe, it would be incorrect to suggest that men and women in the medieval countryside were universally and entirely subsumed within a familial identity, and that they did not act as individuals. Discussion of, for instance, the familial attachment to land, the so-called family–land bond, has generated a good deal of reflection on the nature of the rural economy in this period.36 By extension it may also have something to tell us regarding the contemporary perception of the vitality and significance of the family itself. No doubt the extent to which familial rights over property either superseded or were secondary to the rights of individuals was conditioned by, amongst other things, institutions, local custom, and the nature of the economy. But the culture of the family is and was an inevitable construct of such factors and, in turn, helps determine their force.

There is also little doubt that, where it was of significance, families found opportunity to represent power relations within the family.37 Distinctions of age and of gender were rehearsed in a number of ways. In late medieval Italy it is possible that an implicit indication of power is evident in listings of family members in the catasto, including the organization of subgroups listed according to the age of the male head of the household.38 Welsh hall houses of the later Middle Ages, including the houses of well-to-do peasants and yeomen, exhibit features consistent with a familial organization that placed the male head of the household on a dais at the end of the hall furthest from the entrance, in a manner entirely consistent with that to be found in higher-status households.39 Herlihy also notes that women, not infrequently closer in age to their offspring than were their husbands, acted as intercessors between child and father. We see this in the German poem Helmbrecht, where, while the father rejects his mutilated robber-son, it is the mother who offers him a crust “as if to a child.” In so doing mothers were seen as replicating, within the domestic setting, the role of the Virgin and of other female saints.40 The culture of space and its use within the household can also be identified in other contexts, not least in its evolution. In some parts of Europe we can chart a development of the domestic space in the countryside, a response to changes in fashion, political circumstance, and the wider economy. While we could as appropriately discuss such developments under the heading of “economy” or “family and household structure,” shifts in the organization of the physical household had inevitable cultural import. Thus, for example, we witness, in certain parts of Europe, the creation of “new” space in the medieval house, in response to changing economic circumstance and the opportunity to employ non kin as domestic servants within the household. The movement within late medieval house construction to incorporate private rooms and solars, also evident amongst the relatively wealthy in parts of Europe in the high and late Middle Ages is testimony both to a changing regard for privacy and personal space and for the opportunity to occasion such a shift in design. The domestic ritual of the household, more evident to us in higher-status households than in their relatively lowlier equivalents, was also an opportunity to confirm positions within the domestic unit, either by explicit reference or by more subtle, and implicit, suggestion. Goldberg has described, admittedly in an urban context, how fifteenth-century books of hours furnished the female members of households with spiritual material that allowed them to adapt their religious expression to their domestic setting, while, also in fifteenth-century England, nonconformity found its expression in reading groups and gatherings, at the core of which was the family.41

That family and household occupied a centrality of sorts is also evident from their roles as a focus for key events of the life cycle. Thus, the vital events of birth, marriage, and death were, of necessity, familial, at least in certain respects, and these tended to be cultural. Celebration or recognition of vital events resided with the family, though often mediated through some external institution such as lordship, of which more below. In similar terms, violence between families might, for instance, have its rituals and cultures of expression, as those who have studied feud in the countryside have described. Blood feud in late medieval Denmark, for instance, was not solely the prerogative of the nobility but might also involve all “good men,” including peasants.42 In such circumstances the roles of victim and of aggressor were determined by blood relationship, with kinship a determining factor in the formal process of remedy. Even where opportunity was presented to calm the insistent demands of the feuding parties, principally through the intervention of law and the “state,” it was the representation of the family and wider kin, an explicit acknowledgment of blood rights, that tended to hold sway even with some diminution of familial authority toward the end of the period.43

Families were also a signal source of their own collective memories, a potentially crucial component in asserting rights over property and ordering succession. While the wider community and neighbors also had an important role to play in gathering and storing information, as, for instance, witnesses to proof-of-age inquests suggest, the immediate family and the wider kin group had a recognized responsibility to preserve information on, inter alia, lineage, ties of blood, and the property of the family. Thus, throughout much of Europe and across the period, certain features of the family, such as degrees of consanguinity and affinity, were determined by the individual and collective capacity of families to remember who was related to whom, and by what degree. Again we might expect the medieval family’s capacity to effect such a role to be infl uenced by a wider context, not the least of which would be the degree to which society preserved an orality relative to accessible sources of public and private written record, such as notaries. It has also been suggested that the development of durable surnames in the high Middle Ages refl ects, among a variety of social groups, anxiety over the transfer of property and a clear desire to preserve identities in ways that ensured an appropriate transmission within the family.44

We should also note, in this discussion of memory and the family, that female members of the family may have had a particular role to play. In most pre-industrial contexts the capacity for any society to generate a large proportion of families comprising more than two generations is remote.45 Issues of survivability, of age at marriage, and of treatment of the elderly, while significant in demographic terms, also have considerable cultural relevance.46 Where, for instance, we find an early age at marriage for females relative to that of males, then we might expect a distinct approach to memorializing the family, in ways determined by gender, with stronger bonds existing between surviving female members across more than one or two generations.47 High-status women in Carolingian Europe were, as van Houts has described, custodians of a family memory and enjoined their male relatives to reflect upon their wider familial responsibilities.48 That said, we should also recognize that the terminology of familial relationships is often not so extensive in this period as to encourage a sense that family members carried with them a detailed knowledge of their own lineage, and administrative records seldom identify blood relations at more than two or three removes from the individual.49

Beyond the immediate family and household, interaction with other family and kin groups might generate its own range of broadly cultural responses, with established modes of dealing. The coming-together of families, at point of marriage, promoted events and rituals at least in part intended to make public, to cement, and to celebrate such unions. The thirteenth-century German poem that describes a public exchange of vows and the ritual treading by the groom on the foot of the bride is mirrored in other public exchanges elsewhere in Europe.50 The exchange of goods by dowry made explicit this coming-together of families, as did the institution of god-parenthoo, which provided a means of celebrating the virtues of the family while at the same time extending its associations and networks. In the late-thirteenth-century Pyrenees, for example, the acceptance of the role of godparent and attendance of baptism brought opportunities for infl uence as it also brought obligation for support and the development of the offspring of the family.51 It is also important to note that the family, inheritance, and, in particular, marriage were routes to success and social advancement. It is has been noted by more than one commentator that high-status males across medieval Europe might advance their position through marriage; in such circumstances also a cultural shift might be effected within the family through association by the female line with a new household.52

In a number of respects also the culture of the family, as also in the case of the economy and the structure of the family, was conditioned by factors external to it. Not the least of these external factors, especially for a servile peasantry, were lordship and the Church. The direct consequences of lordship for unfree peasant families, of serfs and villeins, in different parts of Europe and at different points in the Middle Ages, were, broadly speaking, to inhibit freedom of choice and action. Vital events – birth, death, and marriage – were each of consequence for lords keen to protect their tenantry as an economic investment and to regulate any transfer of property, particularly in the instances of marriage and death. We might reasonably expect such events to be imbued with ritual and cultural significance, which indeed they were, as we have already discussed in the case of marriage, but they were also events informed by the lord’s own expectations. In particular, marriage and death both frequently attracted some financial penalty or license, an expectation that the Church also placed upon the same events while at the same time contriving to draw them within its aegis. It has, for instance, been suggested that the limited incidence of joint-family organization (zadruge) in parts of Macedonia in the late Middle Ages may be a consequence of lordly insistence that households were divided according to conjugal units.53 Lords might also choose to effect changes in strategies of inheritance, to insist upon retirement of the infirm, to control the remarriage of widows, and so on. Such direct involvement could not but infl uence the nature of familial identities and the integrity of family and household bonds. In similar ways, attitudes to family, both within the countryside and in the towns, were infl uenced by external views of the family and of relations within and beyond it. Attitudes to marriage and to degrees of consanguinity, to illegitimacy, affinity and the treatment of children, including infanticide, were each mediated by the Church’s teaching in this period. The Church’s claim on property and the competing claims of family are also highly relevant, not least in a period when such competition appears to have heightened. In such circumstances the durability of family and the force of its claim upon the individual relative to the claims of other bodies, such as the Church, the lord, the State, the local community, were contested.

Conclusion

To a large degree our focus upon the central facets of the rural family across the Middle Ages is determined by the preoccupations of earlier historians. In terms of the body of secondary work on the medieval rural family, a significant proportion of that work was generated by local or regional studies that included, as one element of their analysis, a demographic and social structural account of the area of study. In many respects, study of the domestic economy has emerged in a similar way, though, in recent years, and especially within an Anglophone historiography, there has also been a program of research on markets and commerce, part of which has included study of the family economy and its place within wider commercial networks. Inevitably also our view is conditioned by the sources that survive, as well as the preparedness of historians to engage with them. In that sense a progress through constitutional and juridical sources of the family, including the statements of canon lawyers, through listings of family groups and heads of households, through qualitative sources and the material and archaeological remains of the medieval family and household also refl ects the changes in historical approach and fashion outlined above. Indirectly, the combination of these approaches has brought historians to a fuller view of the medieval rural family, so that we now, through a series of case and thematic studies, have arrived at a broad consensus on, inter alia, the typicality of familial structure, the relative significance of factors external to the immediate family, and the strength of familial ties. In certain degree the prevalence of certain historical “projects,” such as the quest to identify the extent of nuclearization, risks a reduction of diversity, and the failure to concentrate upon the particular and the local, or indeed to generate new questions around the medieval family, whether rural or urban. That said, the extent to which family and kinship mattered in this period relative to the individual and to other forms of association capable of providing support and nurture remains an issue of some historical relevance and investigation. It may though be the case that, in a European historiography that is increasingly Anglophone and, at the same time, open to the research of those working on Central and Eastern Europe, the next generation of major research questions will be generated from outside Western Europe.

Notes

1 Lambert and Schofield, Making History.
2 See, e.g., Laslett with Wall, Household and Family. One study of the post-medieval family in Europe, but with clear reference for those interested in the medieval family and household, is Flandrin, Families in Former Times, while Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe, also has a good deal on rural families in the later Middle Ages and earlier.
3 See, e.g., on space and the household, Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture.
4 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, pp. 536ff; for Chayanov, see, inter alia, M. Bourin, “Preface”, in Feller and Wickham, eds, Le Marché de la terre, pp. viii–ix, and the observation that Chayanov does not have the same relevance in a French historiographical tradition.
5 See, e.g., Duby and le Goff, Famille et parenté dans l’occident médiéval. In addition, particular aspects of life cycle, little explored in this chapter, have generated some significant areas of research. There is, for instance, a growing literature on childhood, most famously prompted by the thesis of Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale. Among studies of childhood that include reference to families and their children in the countryside, two broad statements are Orme, Medieval Childhood, and Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages. Themes with potential relevance for the study of the medieval rural family are infanticide and illegitimacy, and both have received attention in recent decades. The study of infanticide in the Middle Ages, in part a product of a psycho-historical approach, was especially prominent in the 1970s, and attracted more attention from historians of childhood than it did from medievalists, as the debate between Kellum and Helmholz illustrates: Kellum, “Infanticide in England”; Helmholz, “Infanticide in the Province of Canterbury.” Studies of the treatment of children, as well as attitudes to illegitimacy and the illegitimate, have also been considered by historians interested in demography and social structure, as, for instance, Smith, “Marriage Processes in the English Past.”
6 Laslett, “Introduction: The History of the Family,” pp. 1–89.
7 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 551.
8 Catalonia: To Figueras, Familia i hereu a la Catalunya Nord-Oriental, pp. 76–7; early medieval France: Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 56, 69–70; Greece: Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society, p. 81. Similar observations have also been made for northwestern Russia in the late Middle Ages and early modern period: Moon, Russian Peasantry, p. 158. Italy: Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany,” pp. 279–80. England: Smith, “Hypothèses sur la nuptialité,” pp. 120–4.
9 Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition, pp. 232–5; Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, pp. 119–20.
10 Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society, pp. 79–81; Hammell, “Household Structure in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia,” pp. 259–62. On the problems associated with a simple association between household structure and the concept of zadruga, as well as a generally useful discussion of zadruga, see Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern, pp. 127–33.
11 Laslett, “Introduction: The History of the Family,” pp. 23ff.
12 Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany,” pp. 277–8.
13 Woolgar, Great Household, cc. 2–3; Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany,” pp. 280–1.
14 Razi, “Myth of the Immutable English Family.”
15 Bieniak, “Clans de chevalrie,” pp. 321–8; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, pp. 126–7.
16 Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities, pp. 89–91, while here describing rural
confraternities, has argued that the inclination for such organization is best seen as an
essentially urban phenomenon.
17 Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” and “Two Kinds of Pre-Industrial Household Formation System,” pp. 65–104.
18 But note Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 76–7, 104–11.
19 Smith, “Hypothèses sur la nuptialité,” pp. 109–10; Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities, pp. 49–51.
20 Stuard, “To Town to Serve: Urban Domestic Slavery,” pp. 39–55.
21 Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, pp. 280ff.
22 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 50–64; Razi, “Myth of the Immutable English Family,” pp. 3–44.
23 Howell, Land, Family and Inheritance in Transition, pp. 235–6.
24 Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 86, and references therein.
25 Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany,” p. 274.
26 Klapisch and Demonet, “ ‘A une pane et uno vino,’ ” p. 53.
27 Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, pp. 107–13.
28 See, e.g., Epstein, “Peasantries of Italy,” p. 91.
29 Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, pp. 156ff, 177–8; Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 243–5; Whittle, “Housewives and Servants in Rural England,” p. 71.
30 e.g. Kermode, Medieval Merchants, pp. 110–12.
31 Schofield, “Social Economy of the Medieval Village.”
32 Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England, pp. 256–9.
33 See, for a useful summary of the theory in this respect, Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death, pp. 141–8.
34 See, e.g., Leyser, Rule and Conflict.
35 Davies, Small Worlds, p. 71; Kravari, “Les Actes privés des Monastères de l’Athos,” pp. 85–6.
36 Feller and Wickham, eds, Le Marché de la terre.
37 Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages, p. 172.
38 Klapisch and Demonet, “ ‘A une pane et uno vino.’ ”
39 Suggett, Houses and History in the March of Wales, p. 85.
40 Herlihy, Medieval Households, pp. 121–2; for Helmbrecht, see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, p. 252.
41 Goldberg, “What was a Servant?” pp. 8–9.
42 Netterstrøm, “Feud, Protection and Serfdom,” pp. 373–4.
43 Flandrin, Families in Former Times, pp. 15–16. On the reduced claim of kin vis-à-vis the state, see, e.g., Pollock and Maitland, The Hstory of English Law, vol. ii, pp. 473–4. 
44 See, e.g., Bourin and Durand, Vivre au village au Moyen Âge, pp. 37–8. See also Duby, “Family Structures,” pp. 108–9.
45 See, e.g., Herlihy, Medieval Households, p. 71.
46 See, e.g., Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant Society, p. 82. Also van Houts, Memory and Gender.
47 See, above, for instance at Kibworth Harcourt, where three-generational female associations were more common than were similar male associations. Also, Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany,” p. 272.
48 Van Houts, Memory and Gender, c. 4, esp. pp. 66–73. Note also Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage, p. 235, and the particular significance of matrilineal lines of succession.
49 See, e.g., Davies, Small Worlds, p. 68.
50 Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages, pp. 178–9.
51 Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, p. 127. On godparenthood, see also Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities, pp. 70–3 and references therein.
52 See, e.g., Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage, p. 229 and references.
53 Hammell, “Household Structure in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia,” p. 270. But see also n. 10 above, and references there to zadruga.

By Phillipp R. Schofield in " A Companion to the Medieval World" edited by Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, Wiley-Blackwell,UK, 2009, excerpts pp.111-127. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.