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Peasant women and inheritance of land in fourteenth-century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2014

SANDY BARDSLEY
SANDY BARDSLEY*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Moravian College.
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Abstract

This study argues that women's ownership of land – an important component of their status – changed little, if at all, after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. Using rentals and obit data from court rolls, a new formula for measuring female inheritance is devised which shows that daughters received even less of their expected due during the plague years. While high death rates might predict that brotherless daughters would be more likely to inherit land, inheritance practices shifted so that women continued to hold much the same total area as before. The article considers several reasons for this continuity, concluding that women found it especially hard to compete in an era of acute labour shortage.

Les paysannes du quatorzième siècle et leur accès à l'héritage foncier en angleterre

Dans cet article, l'auteur soutient que la part des femmes en matière de propriété foncière – une composante importante de leur statut – a peu changé (et même n'a peut-être pas changé du tout) avec la peste noire qui sévit au milieu du XIVe siècle. Reposant sur l’étude des baux de location et des données post portem archivées par les cours de justice, une formule est mise au point pour mesurer la part des paysannes à l'héritage foncier. Les résultats montrent que, pendant les années de peste, les filles reçurent moins en héritage qu'elles n'auraient normalement dû. Pourtant, des taux de mortalité élevés auraient pu laisser prédire que les filles qui n'avaient pas de frère seraient susceptibles de recevoir des propriétés foncières en plus grande quantité, mais les pratiques d'héritage se modifièrent de sorte que les femmes continuèrent à tenir au total la même superficie foncière qu'auparavant. L'auteur envisage plusieurs raisons pour expliquer cette continuité, et conclut qu'il fut particulièrement difficile pour les femmes de rivaliser, à une époque qui connaissait une pénurie de main-d’œuvre aiguë.

Bauernfrauen und die erbschaft von land im england des 14. jahrhunderts

Dieser Beitrag vertritt die These, dass weiblicher Landbesitz – ein bedeutendes Merkmal des Status als Frau – nach dem Schwarzen Tod in der Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts sich nur wenig – wenn überhaupt – veränderte. Unter Verwendung von Zinsbüchern und Todesdaten in grundherrschaftlichen Gerichtsrollen wird eine neue Formel zur Messung weiblicher Erbschaften entworfen, die zeigt, dass Töchter während der Pestjahre sogar weniger als ihre erwarteten Anteile erhielten. Während man bei hohen Todesraten erwarten könnte, dass Töchter ohne Bruder mit höherer Wahrscheinlichkeit Land erbten, führte ein Umschwung der Vererbungspraktiken dazu, dass Frauen weiterhin über etwa dieselbe gesamte Landfläche verfügten wie zuvor. Der Beitrag wägt unterschiedliche Gründe für diese Kontinuität ab und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Frauen es besonders schwer hatten, in einer Zeit akuten Arbeitskräftemangels gegen Männer zu konkurrieren.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , December 2014 , pp. 297 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

ENDNOTES

1 Hatcher, John, ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’, Past and Present 144 (1994), 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For discussion of the ‘golden age’, see Barron, Caroline M., ‘The “golden age” of women in medieval London’, Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989), 33–58Google Scholar; Barron, Caroline M., ‘Introduction: the widow's world in later medieval London’, in Barron, Caroline M. and Sutton, Anne F. eds., Medieval London widows, 1300–1500 (London, 1994), xiii–xxxivGoogle Scholar; Bennett, Judith M., ‘Confronting continuity’, Journal of Women's History 9 (1997), 73–94Google Scholar; Bennett, Judith M., Ale, beer, and brewsters in England: women's work in a changing world, 1300–1600 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Goldberg, P. J. P., Women, work, and life-cycle in a medieval economy: women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 See, for instance, Smith, Richard M., ‘Coping with uncertainty: women's tenure of customary land in England, c. 1370–1430’, in Kermode, Jennifer I. ed., Enterprise and individuals in fifteenth-century England (Gloucester, 1991), 43–67Google Scholar; Phillips, Kim M., Medieval maidens: young women and gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003), 123–7Google Scholar; Mullan, John, ‘Mortality, gender, and the plague of 1361–2 on the estate of the Bishop of Winchester’, Cardiff Historical Papers, 2007/8Google Scholar; Howell, Cicely, Land, family & inheritance in transition: Kibworth Harcourt 1280–1700 (New York, 1983), 242–7Google Scholar.

4 Smith, ‘Coping with uncertainty’, 48.

5 Phillips, Medieval maidens, 127.

6 Smith, Richard M., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250–1800’, in Smith, Richard M. ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 1–86Google Scholar, here 18–19.

7 The age and frequency of marriage have been much discussed by historians of late medieval England. A good summary can be found in Kowaleski, Maryanne, ‘Singlewomen in medieval and early modern Europe: the demographic perspective’, in Bennett, Judith M. and Froide, Amy M. eds., Singlewomen in the European past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), 38–81Google Scholar, here 40–51.

8 Bennett, Judith M., ‘Public power and authority in the medieval English countryside’, in Erler, Mary and Kowaleski, Maryanne eds., Women and power in the middle ages (Athens, GA, 1988), 18–36Google Scholar. Bennett's distinction between power and authority in this article particularly concerns women's exclusion from positions within the manorial court rather than within marriage.

9 Hanawalt, Barbara A., The wealth of wives: women, law, and economy in late medieval London (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

10 The Winchester data cited below come from pipe rolls; other data are from manorial court rolls.

11 L. R. Poos, and Smith, R. M., ‘“Legal windows onto historical populations”? Recent research on demography and the manor court in medieval England’, Law and History Review 2 (1984), 128–52Google Scholar, here 135.

12 These are listed in Table 1. For discussion of regional diversity in land-holding patterns, see Schofield, Phillipp R., Peasant and community in medieval England, 1200–1500 (Basingstoke, 2003), 57–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regional diversity in female land-holding is discussed in Phillips, Medieval maidens, 125–7.

13 I examined all post-mortem transfers from Sutton to be found in The National Archives: Public Record Office, United Kingdom DL 30/86/1176-1182 and DL 30/87/1183-1189, and all in printed records for Walsham le Willows (Lock, Ray ed., The court rolls of Walsham le Willows 1303–50 and 1351–99, Suffolk Records Society, volumes 41 and 45 (1998 and 2002)Google Scholar) and Wakefield (The Wakefield court rolls series of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, second series, vol. 2 (1348 to 1350, ed. Jewell, Helen M., 1977)Google Scholar, vol. 3 (1331 to 1333, ed. Sue Sheridan Walker, 1983), vol. 6 (1350–1352, ed. Moira Habberjam, Mary O'Regan and Brian Hale, 1987), vol. 12 (1338 to 1340, ed. Katherine M. Troup, 1999)).

14 Mullan, John and Britnell, Richard, Land and family: trends and local variations in the peasant land market on the Winchester bishopric estates, 1263–1415 (Hatfield, 2010)Google Scholar, 104, Table 7.1. Much of the research on which this study is based was carried out by Mark Page.

15 Mullan, ‘Mortality, gender, and the plague of 1361–2’, 27–31; Poos and Smith, ‘ “Legal windows…?” ’, 140.

16 Individuals, not tenancies, are counted throughout this section. Where an individual held multiple tenancies, he/she is counted only once. I chose to compare individuals rather than tenancies because the layout of rentals does not always distinguish between pieces of land in different parts of the manor: some rentals list individuals only once and allude to multiple holdings, while others are organised by field, with the same individuals appearing multiple times. If anything, counting individuals rather than tenancies increases the number of women in the samples, since men were more likely to hold multiple tenancies.

17 See the Anonimalle Chronicle, the continuation of Ralph Higden's Polychronicon, and the chronicle of Robert of Avesbury, excerpted in Horrox, Rosemary ed., The Black Death (Manchester, 1994), 63–5Google Scholar.

18 Mate, Mavis E., Daughters, wives and widows after the Black Death: women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, 1998), 127–8Google Scholar, esp. table 4, for East Sussex rentals. Phillips, Medieval maidens, 127.

19 Assessment of land-holding is complicated by the fact that some rents (e.g. Castle Combe, Sotwell Stonor, Weston, Earl's Colne, Lackford) were paid in kind through both goods and labour services, alongside money rents. For the sake of consistency, I have calculated the value of non-money rents according to both prices and wages for comparable years recorded in Rogers, James E. Thorold, A history of agriculture and prices in England, v. 2: 1259–1400 (Oxford, 1866)Google Scholar.

20 I have only been able to find comparable data for Sutton. Prior to 1349, the average entry fine paid by Sutton women was 122.4d. and the average paid by men was 280.3d. In addition, one inheriting group of two married couples paid 120d. In 1349–50, women's entry fees were higher than men's: 28 women or all-female groups paid an average of 202.4d. (although three particularly high fines pulled this average up), and 100 male entry fines averaged 131.1d., while 16 mixed-sex groups averaged 170d.

21 Chanter, J. F., ‘The court rolls of the manor of Curry Rivel in the years of the Black Death, 1348–9’, Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society 56 (1910), 85–135Google Scholar. Here I have noted only lands surrendered to the lord without nominated tenants – that is, I ignored one instance (on p. 127) in which a woman surrendered her lands to the lord and they were immediately granted to a man, since this exchange may have concealed an unwritten maintenance agreement or other quid pro quo exchange.

22 Chanter, ‘Court rolls of the manor of Curry Rivel’, 125, 112, 134.

23 Field, Robert K. ed., Court rolls of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire, 1347–1564, Worcestershire Historical Society, New Series, 20 (2004), 1–65Google Scholar.

24 Mullan, ‘Mortality, gender, and the plague of 1361–2’, 29–30. See also Franklin, P., ‘Peasant widows' “liberation” and remarriage before the Black Death’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 39 (1986), 186–204Google Scholar.

25 Mullan and Britnell, Land and family, 121–2, Table 8.1.

26 Others have made a similar point – Phillips in Medieval maidens, for instance – though not specifically with regard to the plague.

27 For instance, Richard Smith has done much work to extend the population models of E. A. Wrigley, Jack Goody and others and adapt them to the circumstances of late medieval families (see especially his article ‘Some issues concerning families and their property’, 39–54). I have chosen not to use such models here since data on the survival of male heirs exist for each manor and are thus a more precise measure of the local conditions predicting female survivorship.

28 I make the argument about sex ratios, based on both written records and archaeological data, in ‘Missing women: sex ratios in England, 1000–1500’, Journal of British Studies 53 (2014), 273–309Google Scholar. In the calculation of expected inheritance, I have assumed 110 adult men for every 100 women; hence the multiplication of expected inheritance rates by 0.91.

29 Sons on the Winchester manors seem to have died in disproportionate numbers in the epidemic of 1361–1362, however: Mullan and Britnell, Land and family, 110.

30 See n. 3 above.

31 Razi, Zvi, ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’, Past and Present 93 (1981), 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 22–7. Phillipp Schofield has emphasised the importance of inheritance by immigrants and those without family relationships in the manor of Birdbrook (Essex): ‘Tenurial developments and the availability of customary land in a later medieval community’, Economic History Review, new series, 49 (1996), 250–67Google Scholar.

32 Where inheritors had the same surname as the deceased, they were counted as kinsmen or kinswomen, even if no kin relationship was stipulated in the court rolls. As Razi notes (‘Family, land, and the village community’), this method undercounts distant family members with different surnames.

33 Mullan and Britnell, Land and family, 111, table 7.5.

34 Lock, The court rolls of Walsham le Willows 1303–50, 320, 328.

35 Cohn, Samuel K. Jr, The Black Death transformed: disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe (New York, 2002), 210–12Google Scholar.

36 DeWitte, Sharon N. and Wood, James W., ‘Selectivity of Black Death mortality with respect to preexisting health’, Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Science of the United States 105 (2008), 1436–41Google Scholar; DeWitte, Sharon N., ‘The effect of sex on risk of mortality during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349–1350’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139 (2009), 222–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Bolton, J. L., ‘Looking for Yersinia Pestis: scientists, historians, and the Black Death’, in Clark, Linda and Rawcliffe, Carole eds., The fifteenth century XII: society in an age of plague (Woodbridge, 2013), 15–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 For late medieval migration by women from the countryside to towns, see, for instance, Goldberg, P. J. P., ‘Urban identity and the poll taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 43 (1990), 194–216Google Scholar.

39 Mullan and Britnell, Land and family, 113.

40 In calculating these areas I ignored cottages alone and just calculated land expressed in terms of acres, roods and perches. Omitting cottages probably undercounts the total area inherited by women more than that inherited by men, since women were more likely to inherit smaller holdings.

41 Smith, ‘Coping with uncertainty’, 62.

42 See, in particular, Bennett, ‘Confronting continuity’.