A Medieval Life

Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague

Judith M. Bennett, Ruth Mazo Karras

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297355
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. A Medieval Life offers a biography of one woman, a portrait of her world, and an introduction to historical method. Written in a clear and accessible style, it reworks a well-loved book to provide an entirely new resource for students, teachers, and general readers.Like Cecilia Penifader, most people in the Middle Ages were peasants, humble people living socially below the knights, bishops, and kings who figure so large in history books. Judith M. Bennett shows that peasants, too, made history. She explores how peasant lives were closely entangled with the lives and interests of those more privileged, looking at manors as well as villages; parishes, faith, and ritual practices; royal taxes and justice; economy and trade; famine and disease. By moving out from Cecilia's perspective, the book explores the ties and tensions that bound all medieval people—poor as well as rich—into a medieval society.The book also provides a primer on the fact-finding and interpretative debates that are at the heart of the historian's craft. Each chapter includes a new section on how medievalists today are studying such topics as puberty, morals, courtship, and climate change. The illustrations, taken from the famous Luttrell Psalter, provide a coherent, rich, and interpretatively complex visual program. And the final chapter explores some of the different ways in which historians, for better and for worse, have understood medieval society.

CHAPTER 1

Ordinary People

Crusaders marching off to reclaim the Holy Land; kings besieging castles with archers and men-at-arms; bishops celebrating Masses in new cathedrals; merchants haggling for bargains at fairs and markets. These are the people whose stories are told in most histories of the Middle Ages—and these people were, to be sure, important movers-and-shakers in their time. But they were also atypical. Most medieval people were not knights, kings, churchmen, or merchants. Most (more than nine out of ten) were peasants who eked out hard livings from the land. Yet even our modern dramas of medieval-like worlds almost forget this vast peasant population. The smallfolk of the Seven Kingdoms in Game of Thrones are mere background, mentioned passingly as dirty, dull, and mildly dangerous; even the free, unsettled, and foreign wildlings get more respect. In Lord of the Rings, halflings are cleaner, smarter, and more benevolent, but they are hobbits, not humans. Ignored in elite histories and dehumanized in dramatic fantasies, medieval peasants have mostly disappeared from our imagination. This book seeks to right the balance by telling the story of the English peasantry through the life of one very real, very human, and very medieval peasant: Cecilia Penifader who lived in the English midlands in the decades just before the Black Death (1347–1349).

Why should we care about peasants? The simple fact that we have turned medieval peasants into filthy smallfolk and hobbits with hairy feet suggests we had better take a second look. Peasant is not a word that we usually apply today to people who cultivate crops in first-world countries—instead, we call these people farmers and farm laborers. We use peasant to describe cultivators—small cultivators—in less developed economies. In Europe, peasants are understood to have disappeared with modernization, a process that, in the phrasing of one famous book on the subject, made nineteenth-century peasants into modern Frenchmen. In North America, European colonists are deemed to have been transformed—by virtue of their migration and resettlement—from peasants into farmers. In China, where perhaps 50 percent of the population were peasants c. 1950, economists now argue about whether there are any peasants left at all. Yet societies of small, subsistence cultivators persist and even thrive today, especially in Central and South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in south Asia. To put this another way, peasants and peasant economies are part of our present as well as our past. If we think of today’s peasants as smallfolk or halflings, we risk profoundly misunderstanding our contemporary global economy.

For historians of medieval Europe, the importance of peasants derives from two particular ideas about humans and human society. First, ordinary people have mattered in the making of history. U.S. History provides a good example. Any general history of the twentieth-century U.S. rightly talks about extraordinary individuals like Henry Ford, Al Capone, Eleanor Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Rosa Parks, and Bill Gates, but it also describes how the lives of ordinary people changed between 1900 and 2000—better housing and diets, more education, changing sexual mores, and the like. And it also considers how ordinary people changed the course of history, sometimes through collective protest (as with the Vietnam War and civil rights) and sometimes through everyday, private decisions (as with diminished birthrates). Ordinary people make history too—and as we shall see, this was as true of medieval peasants as of modern citizens.

Second, historians understand that history is richer when seen from the margins. It is easy to forget about medieval peasants (the margin) if you start in royal courts and wealthy monasteries (the center). But it is hard to overlook monarchs and monks if you start from peasant cottages. This might sound abstract, but it is concrete and real. For a modern example, consider professional sports. Team owners and players stand at the center of this industry, but if we think about sports only from their perspective (worries about revenues, salaries, and advertising contracts), we can almost lose sight of the fans without whom there would be no revenue-producing leagues and championships. If we flip the perspective and look at professional sports from the viewpoint of the fans (exciting games and charismatic athletes), we never risk forgetting the owners and players, who are simply too rich and famous to ignore. Fans might be on the margins of the sports business, but adopting their perspective helps us remember that professional sports are fundamentally about entertainment.

Cecilia Penifader

By looking at medieval peasants, then, we can see both their rural world and the broader medieval society of which they were a critical part. We stand on the muddy margins with peasants and, looking upward and inward, we can better understand not only poor peasants but also prosperous churchmen, knights, and merchants, all of whom relied on peasant labor. Cecilia Penifader, who will be our guide to the medieval countryside, stood—as a woman and an unmarried one at that—on the edges of her own community. We know a lot more about Cecilia than most other peasants, but a lot less than we would like. Unlike persons featured in modern biographies, Cecilia has left no diaries we can read, no houses we can walk through, no friends or family to be interviewed. Yet the few dozen extant details of her life—each a remarkable and precious survival from a society long past—make her particular story a gateway into the world in which she lived. When paid guides take tourists by foot or bus around cities like London, Paris, or Berlin, they always personalize their spiels by throwing in a few tidbits about themselves (hometown, favorite beer, and the like), both to amuse their audiences and also to make the big city more human and real. Cecilia Penifader will be this sort of guide for us; we will learn the known facts of her particular life, but we will also walk with her through the broader world of medieval villagers and villages.

Cecilia Penifader was born at the end of the thirteenth century; 1297 seems the most likely year. At that time, peasants were just beginning to pass surnames from one generation to the next. Cecilia’s derives from Pennyfather, and it suggests that Cecilia’s paternal grandfather or great-grandfather was known for his miserly habits. Perhaps the penny-pinching of her ancestors explains, in part, the prosperity of her family. Compared to knights and ladies, Cecilia’s parents were poor peasants, but compared to other peasants, her parents numbered among the well-off. As a result, Cecilia grew up in a better-built cottage and with a better diet than many of her poorer neighbors. She also grew up with more siblings than most: three brothers and four sisters. When she was about twenty years old, Cecilia acquired her first bit of land in Brigstock, and for the next twenty-seven years, the records of Brigstock tell a great deal about how she acquired and used her various meadows and fields. They also reveal that she was known to her family and friends as Cissa (a name that the clerks sometimes used instead of the Latinized Cecilia). These same rolls also report that Cecilia sometimes stole grain from her neighbors, sometimes argued with others, and sometimes owned animals that went astray. She never married, but she lived for about a decade next door to one brother, and she later shared a household for about five years with another brother. When she was about forty-five years old, Cecilia fell ill, and after more than a year of poor health, she died in 1344. Just before her death, she tried to give her landholdings to three young people (including one nephew and one niece), but after long and acrimonious arguments, her sister Christina inherited her properties. This is the bare outline of Cecilia’s life, but the medieval archives of Brigstock tell much more.

Like other medieval peasants, Cecilia Penifader left no diaries, letters, or other personal writings. Occasionally a bright and lucky peasant learned to read and write, but most peasants were illiterate. Of the few who gained literacy, almost all were men. The most famous was Robert Grosseteste, born of poor parents about 1168, who escaped his background so thoroughly that he taught at Oxford University and rose to become bishop of Lincoln. Yet Robert Grosseteste was exceptional. He was so intelligent, some sources say, that his surname began as a nickname—“large head”—for a precociously clever boy. Still, his cleverness might have come to nothing. If his parents had needed him at home or if his bailiff had opposed his education, he might never have left the place of his birth. So the educational success of Robert Grosseteste is the exception that proves the rule. Peasants, usually unable to read or write, have left no direct testimonies about their hopes, their fears, their delights, or their disappointments. Even Robert Grosseteste—who wrote a great deal about matters both philosophical and practical—never thought it worth his while to describe the world of his humble youth.

As a result, we know about peasants and their lives indirectly—from the writings of their social superiors. In the tripartite view of society that was popular by the High Middle Ages, peasants rested at the bottom of three orders. As “those who work” (in Latin, laboratores), peasants supported people more privileged—“those who pray” (oratores) and “those who fight” (pugnatores). Each of these three orders ideally helped the other, with clergy contributing prayers and knights providing protection, but the mutuality of the system was more ideal than real. Also, the three groups were not equal. A peasant might have benefited from the prayers of a nun or from the protection offered by a knight, but a peasant was deemed to do work of lesser value and to be a less worthy person (see Figure 1). Born into this unexalted state, a peasant’s lot was to labor for the benefit of others. This was unfortunate for peasants, but fortunate for historians. Because peasants were important economic assets, both “those who pray” and “those who fight” kept careful records of peasant doings. Today, we can use these records to reconstruct the life of an ordinary woman who was born more than seven hundred years ago—and also to learn about the world in which she grew up, matured, and died.

Figure 1. Lords and Peasants. The mutual support of the “Three Orders” was a nice idea, but this image offers a different view. The two hooded peasants on the left are angry—one crossing his arms, and the other holding a tool (a yoke?) and brandishing a glove as a sign of challenge. The object of their discontent looks to be a bailiff or other manorial official (he wears no humble hood), and he is pointing (in justification? or in blame-shifting?) toward a fourth person who approaches with something (a document?) in hand. Some images in the Luttrell Psalter are easy to decipher, but others are, as here, hard to nail down. The bleeding through of images from the other side of the page (here, a fantastical creature with a dog’s head and huge beak) does not help. Yet the Psalter’s depictions of rural life are lively and beautiful—and well worth looking at, again and again. (British Library, Luttrell Psalter, folio 197v.)

How Do We Know What We Think We Know?

Before we consider the documents in which we find Cecilia Penifader and her world, let us consider history and what it can and cannot claim. History and historians once embraced a noble dream, a dream that historians told the truth about the past. Like a god sitting on high, a historian looked back at dead people and wrote The Truth about their lives. Today, truth seems a lot more elusive. Globalism and multiculturalism have taught us that perspective matters—that, say, the voyages of Columbus brought opportunity for Europeans and devastation for Native Americans. Postmodernism has taught us to doubt all truth claims. And social media have produced an epidemic of so-called fake news through which we wade every day, sometimes every hour. Instead of the certain truths of the twentieth century, we now seem to trust nothing and nobody.

The causes of our twenty-first-century skepticism are new, but skepticism is not. Medieval students, who loved music just as much as students today, sang this complaint,

Bad faith and deception grow like weeds

And blatant lying too,

Which steals away the very seeds

Of all that once was true.

Lies and fake news are serious worries, but they have one positive effect: they encourage skepticism which is almost always a good thing, especially among students and voters. Modern life demands that we ask all the time: How do we know what we think we know?

In history, what we know relies on the interplay between two different streams of knowledge: facts and interpretation. Every historian aspires to add new facts to what we know about the past, usually by finding new sources (a diary in an attic!), or using new technologies (DNA analysis!), or simply reading old sources with new questions. For example, when I was a graduate student, I looked at a well-known but little-studied payment required whenever a serf woman married—the payment was called merchet. I found a register that listed hundreds of merchets; I created a database from them; and my analysis allowed me to introduce a new fact to history—that is, that young brides often possessed enough cash to pay this fine themselves.

All historians are fact-finders, and students of history must, of course, get their facts right. Interpretation—the thinking and arguing side of history, where historians discuss what facts actually mean—is just as important. Since some brides paid their own merchets, does this mean that they worked and saved on their own before marriage (much like many women do today)? Were they therefore the economic equals of their husbands? Is merchet-payment a sign of women’s power (they had the cash to pay their own obligations) or a sign of their oppression (merchets were not required of bridegrooms)? Historians thrive on debate—it makes us think harder, read our sources better, and produce new facts. So we almost never agree on a single interpretation for very long. But this does not mean that interpretation is mere bias or opinion. Interpretation must be reasonable, logical, and fact-based. We can argue about what bride-paid merchets meant, but we cannot deny the evidence, and we cannot use the evidence to claim what it cannot prove. It would be poor thinking, for example, to argue that because brides sometimes paid their own merchets, medieval marriages were love matches.

Some historians miss the old noble dream of a god-like history. I do not. By abandoning claims that History = Truth, professors today are, oddly enough, more truthful about what we can and cannot know. Uncertainty can be scary and it can also be abusively deployed, but humility in the face of the world’s marvels simply makes sense. It discourages dogmatism, encourages wisdom, and is steadied by the received wisdom (or common knowledge) on which all historians agree, at least for a time.

This book, like all history books and especially history textbooks, relies on the received wisdom of history—that is, it relies on the knowledge of medieval peasant life that has been forged by generations of fact-finding and interpretive debate. In this regard, English rural history has a huge advantage. Every nation in Europe has its own traditions of rural history. For example, French historians have focused on the oppressive powers of local lords and their castles; Spanish historians have studied the technologies of “dry farming” (mostly Christian) and irrigated farming (mostly Muslim); Polish historians have tackled differences between German settler communities and established Slavic communities; and Italian historians have dwelt on relations between the great city-states of the peninsula and their rural hinterlands. Peasants are present in all these inquiries, but passively so; peasants appear as mere background to histories of feudal power, technology, migration, and urbanism. Not so in English history where, since the ...