PHILIPPA MADDERN

BE T WEEN HOUSEHOLDS : CHILDREN IN BLENDED AND TR ANSITIONAL HOUSEHOLDS IN L ATE-MEDIE VAL ENGL AND

The predominance of the nuclear family in England since the fourteenth century and the concomitant theory that English children normatively lived with their families of origin at least until adolescence has been an article of belief almost unquestioned in late-medieval English historiography over the past forty years. Studies of late-medieval childhood have, in fact, rarely analyzed the lived situations of medieval children, instead primarily addressing the literary or prescriptive representations of childhood or childrens (mostly upper-class boys) education. This paper throws such assumptions and approaches into question. I analyze accounts of the situations of both boys and girls aged under thirteen, from a wide range of social backgrounds, embedded in the records of church courts and Chancery and Papal Petitions in the period 13501500. I argue that a range of factorsmost notably death of a parent and illegitimate birthrendered children liable to be shifted from household to household, often outside their nuclear family altogether. These situations may not have been rare; analysis of records of Inquisitions Post Mortem shows that in nearly twenty percent of a large sample of late-medieval English families, at least one parent died before the eldest child of the couple was thirteen. Furthermore, death of a father, or illegitimacy where the parents were either clerics or servants, could send children into a great range of non-nuclear family situationsshort-term wardships with strangers, underage marriages, a variety of boarding arrangements. Hence, though our sources do not allow a rigorous statistical study of the numbers of late-medieval English children living outside (or between) nuclear families, they enable us better to appreciate the mobility of children outside the nuclear family and bring into view the great range of household situations in which they lived.

ver the past twenty years, many excellent studies of some aspects of the history of late-medieval English children and adolescents have appeared. We now understand in some detail premodern European concepts of youth and childhood and their theoretical place in the human lifecycle.1 Fine research has been carried out into the literary ideals of youth (though not necessarily of childhood),2 and thanks to the work of scholars such as Goldberg and Orme, we
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v.3.1) 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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have good insights into the worlds of education (especially of boys), training, and adolescent servanthood.3 Yet almost no research covers adequately the lived experience of nonaristocratic late-medieval children. True, Hanawalts research into childhood in medieval London is a welcome exception here, and her book allows tantalizing glimpses of childrens real-life circumstances embedded in the voluminous legal and notarial records of London. But it is difficult to tell whether the lives of London children accurately represent those of late-medieval English children outside London.4 Even basic and mundane questions are often answered more by supposition or by reading early modern demographic modelling back onto the late middle ages than by direct research. In particular, the question this paper addresseswhat sorts of households did non-aristocratic children commonly live in?is almost never thoroughly addressed, let alone answered, possibly because the common belief that the vast majority of children stayed in their natal family household at least until they reached adolescence (about the age of twelve) has discouraged research into the range and variety of households in which some children might find themselves.5 Yet evidence from hitherto underused sources into childrens livesnotably from ecclesiastical court cases, Early Chancery Petitions, and Inquisitions Post Mortemshows that in the period 13501500 significant numbers of children under the age of thirteen either moved from household to household or experienced major shifts in the membership of their household. Interrogating these sources enables us to examine, to some degree, what impelled these transitions from natal nuclear families to other forms of household and to reflect on how best we can investigate the lives of children in late-medieval England. It is first necessary to clarify the terms of the discussion. What do I take the terms nuclear-family household or natal family to signify? In its strictest form, a nuclear family may be defined by two main factors: co-residence and a certain limited set of blood relationships. Under this definition the nuclearfamily household would form a co-resident group, comprising solely a conjugal couple plus the child (or children) of both partners. However, it is clear that even societies in which such a familial and household structure is normative and normal will contain many households that vary from this strict prescription. Children may be brought up in single-parent households due to the death or desertion of one of the original couple. The co-resident group may include other memberselderly relatives or unrelated servants, for instance. There may be frequent and successful instances of households that I term nuclear-like: that is, co-resident groups consisting of a married couple and children where the children are related to the adults (and perhaps to the other children) not

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necessarily by blood, but by steprelationships, adoption, or fosterage. In these cases, the natal family of the child (that is, the familial group into which she/ he was born) will differ in membership from the familial household in which the child is brought up. What, then, can we discover about the types of families and households (nuclear, nuclear-like, and other) in which late-medieval children lived? It is unfortunately true that we will probably never know the answer to some of the first questions to spring to mind. It is, for instance, simply impossible to provide any firm statistical estimate of the number or proportion of children at any time in medieval England who were not living in a household with their natal family. Even if we could identify accurately all late-medieval children living in wardship, fosterage, or with stepparents (which we cannot), the absence of any coherent late-medieval English system for recording births, deaths, and marriages renders population estimates for the period so vague that we could not tell of what total population children in non-nuclear family households were a proportion, or even whether they formed a majority or minority of the population. Yet it is possible to take the problem from a different angle. Instead of embarking on a futile attempt to count numbers of children living in blended or single-parent families or moving from household to household, we can rephrase the question to what range of situations led to children moving between households, experiencing a transition in their household membership, or spending significant amounts of time in households other than their natal one? Put this way, the enquiry is capable of producing answers. Combing through ecclesiastical court records, Chancery Petitions, and Inquisitions Post Mortem, mainly from London, York, Kent, and Norfolk for the period 13501500, I have compiled a database of nearly three thousand instances of non-nuclear family household forms in the period 13501500.6 A fair number involve children probably, or certainly, aged thirteen or younger, and from these snapshots of non-nuclear family life, some overall impression of the range of situations in which children lived can be gained. I have restricted the enquiry to children thirteen and under for two reasons. Firstly, it matches reasonably well the age at which most medieval theorists posited that childhood ended and adolescence began. Hence the study imposes no anachronistic definitions of childhood onto the period.7 Secondly, twelve to thirteen is below the age at which most authors conclude that late-medieval English adolescents commonly took the step into the world of work, apprenticeship, and service that separated them from their natal family.8 Thus the family circumstances of these children can be taken to be particular to childhood, rather than to youth or adolescence.

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What, then, were the social or familial circumstances that led preadolescent children either to move between households or to experience major changes in their household membership? Let us start with the most eye-catching example in my sample: the case of young William Aungier from mid-fourteenth century Yorkshire. Williams childhood is known to us because on 30 January 1358, when (according to most witnesses) he was just over fifteen years old, his marriage was annulled in the York Consistory Court for the excellent reason that he had been married well under canonical age and against his will to Joan, daughter of Thomas Malcake. In the course of testifying to both his age and his reluctance, four deponents gave the long history of his upbringing.9 Always allowing for some vagueness and possible insincerity on their parts, the story is as follows. William was born around Michaelmas 1342. His father had died before his birth, and his mother, within a year said one deponent, married again. The young William then lived with his mother, his stepfather, and his maternal grandfather until the time of the pestilence (in Yorkshire probably between June and December 1349). In that first visitation of the plague when William must have been about seven, all three of the adults in Williams household died. The child was then transferred to the care of a relation (nepos)10 on his mothers side, Thomas de Bekyngham, who kept, housed, and fed him until he was eight. At that time, Thomas Malcake of Swinefleet (possibly another relative of Williams mother) bought young Williams wardship and marriage from de Bekyngham and promptly married him offuncanonically, since boys were held to be incapable of free consent to marriage under the age of fourteento his ten-year-old daughter Joan. The pair did not live in one household, however; William was transferred to the care of Thomas Malcakes brother, who took him to Elsing, Norfolk, and kept him at school there for six years. During that time, he was brought back to Yorkshire once, at the age of twelve, for a week, and then again at the age of fourteen, when an unsuccessful attempt was made to set up formal cohabitation between him and his alleged wife Joan. The ecclesiastical judges were convinced that neither party wished to confirm the promises made in childhood, hence their willingness to pronounce an annulment. Where, or with whom, William was living at the time of the divorce cause is unknown. It thus appears that counting the already truncated family into which he was born, by the time he was twelve William Aungier had lived in at least four separate households with five different sets of inhabitants. His natal family consisted of his widowed mother. She may, at the time of his birth, have been living in the household of her father, though the deponents accounts do not clarify her living arrangments. Whether she was or not, the addition of Williams stepfather to the household constituted a significant change in its membership. Thereafter,

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William lived with his mother, stepfather, and grandfather; then, after their deaths, moved to the household of his nepos; then to that of his guardians by purchase; then to his school, or tutors house, at Elsyng; and finally, at the age of fourteen, to his own alleged marital household. Clearly, Williams was not a typical childhood. Indeed he is the most mobile child, with the most experience of household transition, whom I have so far come across in my research. But consideration of the circumstances of 189 children known from Chancery Petitions, ecclesiastical court cases, or Inquisitions Post Mortem, to have been living in households other than those of their natal families in the years 13501500 demonstrates that he was far from alone. As table 1 shows, 158 children are known to have lived in at least two different household situations, while a further thirty-one experienced more than one shift either in living place or in family membership. Furthermore, breaking up the resultant total of 228 moves into categories of reasons for the transition to new living arrangements (table 2) suggests that William Aungier was less an exception to, than an epitome of, his own times. Like William, 144 other children lost at least one parent and consequently lived either in stepfamilies or with guardians, who in turn might be related distantly if at all to their original parents. Like William, five other children were subject to a sale or transfer of their wardship, and five were married under age. Like William, twenty-seven other children were sent away from home to school. It is worth noting that almost all transitions involved the physical movement of the child from one household to another. Only in cases where the child is known to have been living with their remaining blood parent plus a stepparent or other relative is it possible to suggest that the change consisted of the addition

Table 1. Numbers of children identified as moving between households, 13501500. Numbers of children known to have Number of households Two Three Four Five Total number of children Total number of moves moved between households 158 24 6 1 189 228

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Table 2. Identifiable reasons for changes of household for children, 13501500.

Percentage Reasons for transition Death of parent (generally father) Orphaned Child living with mother and stepfather/mother and other relation/ father and stepmother Child living with (often unrelated) guardian Ravishment of child by competing guardian Sale or transfer of wardship/care Underage marriage following parents (generally fathers) death Widowed mother buys/takes back wardship Child boarded in convent, monastery, or school Child put to wetnurse/fosterage Child put into monastery Child put to service Other (including 1 alleged sale of baby) Total 43 33 18.860 14.474 63.597 Number Grouped

(of 228 moves) percentages

69 15 6 6 7 28 5 4 4 8 228

30.263 6.579 2.632 2.632 3.070 12.280 2.193 1.754 1.754 3.509 100.00 100.00 21.490 14.913

Note that this table categorizes numbers of childrens transits, not numbers of children; William Aungier, for instance, will appear four times in the table, under the categories Child living with mother and stepfather, Child living with (often unrelated) guardian, Sale or transfer of wardship/care, and Child boarded in convent, monastery, or school. Nevertheless, the categories cannot be made mutually exclusive since more than one set of circumstances might dictate moving a child from one household to another; for example, William was also orphaned and married under age. Orphaned here has the modern significance; both the childs blood parents known to have died before the child was aged thirteen. Main sources of figures: Chancery Petitions; Borthwick Cause Papers; Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Deposition Book and Office Acta; York Minster Archives Consistory Court Book, 13711375; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Act Books; Lawrence Poos, ed., Lower Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in Late-Medieval England; the Courts of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, 13361349, and the Deanery of Wisbech, 14581484, (Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2001); Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem (hereinafter CIPM), vols. I (London HMSO 1898), IX (London HMSO 1916), X (London, HMSO, 1924), XI (London, HMSO, 1935), XVI (London, HMSO, 1974), XIX (London, HMSO 1992), XX ed. J. L. Kirby, (London, HMSO, 1995), XXII ed. Kate Parkin, (London, The Boydell Press for The National Archives, 2003), XXIII, ed. Claire Noble, (London, The Boydell Press for The National Archives, 2004).

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of a new member to the household, rather than the removal of the child to a different household; but these types of transitions comprise only 14.47% of all household changes. It is also almost certain that, like William, most of these children were at least under the age of thirteen, and sometimes considerably younger, when their transitions from the natal family began. It is true that the question of the age of children at first moving households or experiencing transition in household membership is not a simple one. In many cases the records give little indication of age, except for the identification of the subject as the child of another party, though the circumstances of the case may suggest that they were not far advanced into adolescence. Thomas Herford, for instance, son of a London merchant, was young enough to require the escort of Marco Strozzi when he was sent to Pisa ther to be at scole sometime in the period 14931500.11 Yet where firm indications of age can be found, most of the children were young. The records give the ages at first transition of 111 of such children. They may not, of course, be entirely accurate, but they do tell us how old the childrens contemporaries believed them to be. The results are summarised in table 3 below. Clearly there is no clustering at the upper limit of childhood; indeed the largest single group of children was said to be aged seven to eight years, and the great majority (eighty of the 111, or seventy-two percent) were under eleven. Many comparatively young children lived away from surviving members of their natal families, some at considerable distances from them. Alice Wodelok was specifically said to be only seven when she was living in the care of Richard

Table 3. Ages of 111 children known to have experienced household transition 13501500. Age groups Up to, but not including, 3 years 34 years 56 years 78 years 910 years 1112 years 1314 years Total no. of children Numbers of children 14 3 13 28 22 24 7 111

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Sauton of Collinbourne in Wiltshire, though her mother Pernell and stepfather William Burton were probably living in London. Furthermore, her mothers and stepfathers petition was that a man called Ludovic Gryvill of Oxford had kidnapped Alice, effectively holding her to ransom until William Burton should stand guarantor for a debt owed to Gryvill by Sauton.12 John Schelve was ten at the death of his father in 1384. His mother was perhaps already dead, since the jurors noted that the boy was in the custody of John Blake, the parson of Grafton, Worcestershire; but young John had already been sent out of the districtthe jurors do not know where.13 The son of Guy Aford of Normandy was slightly olderaboute the age of xiij yerewhen his father decided that he no longer wanted his heir to be in the kepyng of oon William Browne Goldsmyth of London and sent for him to come home. How long he had been living across the Channel is unknown.14 What were the major forces driving children into one or more alternative households? Table 2 clearly suggests that the most important factor was the death of one or both parents, particularly the death of the father. Over eighteen percent of the sample were orphans (in the modern sense that both their parents were dead) who must have been brought up in the households either of strangers or of relatives outside the immediate nuclear circle. In a further 102 cases (44.74%) a parents death meant that the child was living either with the remaining blood parent and a stepparent, or with the remaining parent and another adult, or with a possibly unrelated guardian. Such households could be of varying kinds. In the cases of heirs and heiresses, the childs residence might depend on who wished to control the inheritance. Thus, when her father died in 1387, six-year-old Elizabeth Playce was taken to live with her mother and her maternal grandmother, Thomasia de Furnyvall. But in the superficially similar case of Alice Trenchant, aged four at the death of her father Edward, inquisition jurors later deposed that she had been carried . . . away by one William de Fyfhyde, probably a remote relation, who according to one group of jurors had rights over some of the Trenchant inheritance.15 In the wake of parental death siblings might be distributed between more than one household. Of the five children of the deceased Thomas Besil, the two younger sons and two daughters apparently lived in the household of their mother Clemence and her second husband, John Nowers, but the eldest son, William, was delivered to the kepyng of one William Warbulton. According to the complaint of John and Clemence, Warbulton had married the heir, without their consent, to a daughter of Richard Harecourt.16 In sum, in over sixty-three percent of cases the death of parents entailed children either moving to a new household or experiencing significant change in

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their household membership. Moreover, in a further thirty-four cases (14.91%) the childs move to a new household depended on the foregoing death of the parent. As we have seen in the case of William Aungier, children in wardship could be sold to a competing guardian, or married off underage; and in either case might become the subject of claim and counter-claim for wardship and marriage. The complex case of the daughter of Otis Trevnwith of Cornwall is a case in point. Otiss feoffees, William Rosmedres and Perys Trevnwith (the latter presumably a relative), complained in Chancery that on his deathbed Otis had granted them the kepyng & gouernans of his daughter, then with inne age, together with the right to assent to her marriage. Accordingly, after Otis was dead, they maried here with Inne age to Henry, son of Thomas Luccombe (then also under age), and sent her for norture to board with Walter of Moyll in Kent. The trouble began when Henry died, and Thomas Luccombe seized the opportunity to remove the girl from Moylls house with the entente to marie here at full age. . . . . . contrary to the wille of her ffader & your saide Besechers. Rosmedres and Trevnwith demanded that the Chancellor secure her return to them, vnmaried. The girl, who is never named, must still have been under twelve. Interestingly, her mother was evidently alive, since it was alleged that Thomas Luccombe persuaded Walter of Moylls wife to hand the child over by creating the Imaginatiff story that the moder of the saide childe lay in perell of deth. There is no evidence that possible maternal claims to the guardianship of the child carried any weight in this legal forum.17 The importance of parental death in setting children on their travels (sometimes through more than one household) is particularly significant to our understanding of how common these social formations might have been because a body of material exists from which we can judge with fair accuracy the proportion of families in late-medieval England in which a parent died, leaving at least one child under the age of twelve. The series of Inquisitions Post Mortem taken on the death of any individual holding any property (however small) directly from the king were designed to identify, and establish the age of, the heir. A search of a sample of eight volumes of the Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem from the second half of the fourteenth century to the late fifteenth century shows that a significant, and fairly steady, proportion of tenants-inchief died leaving young children. Though the proportions vary slightly over time, overall nearly twenty percent of 3292 individual inquisitions reported one or more surviving children aged from twelve downwards. Admittedly, inquisition jurors are not noted for assessing ages accurately, and different jurors accounts of childrens ages may vary by one or two years. But it seems most unlikely that in assessing the ages of

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Table 4. Proportions of tenants-in-chief who died leaving children aged twelve or under, in eight calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 13501500. Total IPMs Calendar of IPM volume X. 2634 Edward III (13521360) XI: 3538 Edward III (13611364) XVI: 715 Richard II (13841391) XIX: 714 Henry IV (14051413) XX: 15 Henry V (14131418) XXII: 15 Henry VI (14221427) XXIII: 610 Henry VI (14271431) I. 112 Henry VII (14851496) Total: in volume 511 551 379 363 223 228 277 760 3292 No. of cases where parent died leaving child(ren) 12 or under 84 107 59 83 45 38 57 153 626 Percent (row) 16.44 19.42 15.57 22.87 20.18 16.67 20.58 20.13 19.02

children they could be many years astray. To ensure a conservative estimate, in cases where juries estimates differed, I have taken the older age to be definitive, thus excluding from the table any heirs said (for instance) to be twelve by one jury but thirteen by another. Yet with all precautions taken, the evidence suggests that between one in six and one in five families in late-medieval England reached a situation where one or more of their children was likely to leave the parental home or experience a significant change in its membership because of the death of a parent. There is no reason to suppose that parents who were tenants-in-chief would die earlier or would have produced children later in life than any other sector of the population; on the contrary, if anything property -holders might be supposed to be able to marry earlier and survive longer than the poorer ranks of society. It is fair to suggest, therefore, not that one in five children was likely to have moved households in the later middle ages, but that something like one in five families faced the possibility of child dispersal or

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transit and that up to one in six of children in those circumstances would make a subsequent transit to a second or even third household. We must also assume that many children in this situation were young. The cases summarized in table 4 yield a total of 723 children,18 of whom over half (372 or 51.5%) were said to be aged six or less. Yet this major causative factor of the death of parents aside, in over one-fifth of the cases in table 2 (21.49%), children were transferred to different household settings even though they had at least one, and possibly two, living parents. This situation could arise because of the sudden incapacity of a household head, producing similar effects to those that might have pertained at his death. Thus, the inquisition on the sanity of John de Heton, taken in 1354, found that when he succumbed to serious mental illness in 1348 at the age of twenty-four, he already had three children under the age of six. Both de Hetons wife Margaret and his brother William conceived it their duty to care for the sick man, manage his livelihood, and act as guardian to his children, but by 1352 the joint guardianship had broken down. Margaret would not dwell with her husband in the company of William de Heton, his brother, and the latter would not let his brother be away from his guardianship in that of his wife. By this time, too, the eldest child, John, had been married to a daughter of Adam de Clyfton (uncanonically, since he was apparently only eight in 1352). Friends of the family brokered an agreement. Certain lands were set aside for the support of the two younger children, who were to remain in the guardianship of William de Heton the elder, while Margaret, her eldest son John, and his wife Margery were to live on the remainder in the household of Adam de Clyfton.19 The elements of disputed guardianship, underage marriage, and division of siblings resemble closely some of the situations seen in the cases of death of parents. But other circumstances leading to child mobility had less to do with the deathlike incapacity of a parent than with either parental choice or the peculiar circumstances of the childs parents. In table 2 the most common destination of children outward bound from two-parent homes (whether nuclear or nuclearlike) was apparently (though perhaps misleadingly) a boarding school in a monastery or convent (12.28% of all cases). How common such a practice was is hard to tell since records of children boarding were not consistently kept across different institutions and time periods. The series of almoners rolls for Norwich priory, 140237, for instance, show that at least eighteen boys from neighbouring Norfolk families boarded at the priory for some time without, apparently, their parents intending them to become monks there; though before and after this period, the rolls are blank as to possible boarders. Nor were there standard periods for which children were sent out to board. At Norwich priory,

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some boys stayed only for a short time; William Caston boarded for only five weeks in the year 142021.20 Others, however, spent whole years away from their birth family. Roger Blicklings son stayed from early 1421 to around June 1425 at the priory, including the whole of the years 142224.21 Girls, too, were boarded out. The chance survival of account rolls from the Cistercian nunnery at Marham in Norfolk, 142627, show that five girls were boarding there, including two sisters of one family.22 We know that such boarders were not necessarily orphaned. Around 1450, Alice Golefre certainly had a father living in Westminster, who was then married to either her mother or her stepmother, but Alices grandmother (or possibly second wife of her paternal grandfather), living at Coventry, had, she said, paide for the table of Alice the doughter of the seid Nicholas beyng soiournaunt at Nuneton by iij yere.23 Boarding might not come particularly cheap; Roger Blicklings parents paid a shilling a week for his place at Norwich priory. Yet the surnames of the pupils indicate that it was an option open to relatively middle-range gentry. None of the pupils at Norwich priory, for instance, can be indentified even as coming from knightly families. Most were the sons of merchants, esquires, or gentlemen. Concentration on the statistics for boarding or fosterage, however, may obscure a more significant cause of children living outside their birth family illegitimacy. It is salutary to note that one of the Norwich almoners accounts records payment for four weeks board in 142930 for the little son of the Rector of Tuddenham (puero parvulo Rectoris de Tudenham). The boy cannot have been legitimate.24 What, then, can we deduce from the records about the life circumstances of illegitimate children? They do not figure explicitly in table 2 because medieval commentators rarely recorded exactly what became of illegitimate offspring, but the briefest study of illegitimate children in this period suggests that they were unlikely to be living with all members of their natal families, or even in long-lasting nuclear-family households. It is true that some illegitimate children may have been adopted into nuclear, or nuclear-like, families, either in charity or because childless families wanted them. The accounts cited in the dispute over the estate of Sir Ralph Verney, for instance, show that at the time of his death he was paying for the Norsyng of a maiden childe founden in the Strete, which suggests either an illegitimate birth, or a mother so poor that she could not keep her child, or both.25 In a rare 1390 case it was alleged that the wife of Ralph de Basset of Weldon had bought a male baby from its mother shortly after its birth, to the end that the same little infant should be taken to be the son of Ralph (ad effectum quod ipse infantulus filius. . . . . . domini Radulphi putaretur).26 Apart from these instances, the circumstance that might conduce to an illegitimate childs finding a place in

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a nuclear or nuclear-like household would be if the father and mother married subsequent to the childs birth. Studies by Laslett and Adair on illegitimacy in early modern England conclude that it was often related to courtshipthe result of premarital sex between partners intending to marry and bring up children. .27 Granted that latemedieval records do not allow the processes of family reconstruction painstakingly exercised by Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Society, can our records shed any light on the contexts of illegitimacy in the period 13501500 and their possible effects on the life circumstances of illegitimate children? It turns out that they can. Using figures both from the calendars of papal letters giving dispensations for illegitimate sons to enter the priesthood and from the prosecutions for bearing or fathering illegitimate children in late-medieval ecclesiastical courts, I have compiled a set of 302 cases of illegitimate children 13501500 where something can be known of the identity and marital status of the father and 184 cases where similar information survives for the mother. The results suggest that on the whole, fathers and mothers of illegitimate children were not particularly likely to be in a position to house and care for their offspring, either at the time of the childs birth or afterwards. True, over twenty-five percent of known fathers were married laymen, who might have had a nuclear-like home to offer their baseborn child. But this proportion is dwarfed by the forty-one percent of fathers who were either priests, monks, unmarried laymen, or servants. For none of these men can it have been easy to create a facsimile of a nuclear-family household for their illegitimate children, even if they were willing to do so. The situation seems to have been even worse for mothers of illegitimate children; nearly one-third (32.07%) were unmarried and another third (33.7%) were servants. As I have argued elsewhere, some domestic servants in late-medieval England did marry, but the records yield almost no signs of servants setting up households together in which to raise children or of any willingness on the part of employers to house the children of their servants.28 All in all, the chances of a late-medieval illegitimate child being raised in a strictly defined nuclear-family household seem remote. Anecdotal evidence suggests that illegitimate children could be highly mobile, living in very fluid households. The York Cause Papers for 1434 tell the poignant story of Robert Smith, his partner, and her illegitimate children. On the testimony of Roberts nephew (confusingly also named Robert Smith), it appears that some eight years before the cause came to court, Smith the elder, then married but living at Saltfleet Haven in Lincolnshire, fell in love (or lust) with a married woman named Marjorie and fathered a child by her. Soon after the childs birth, he

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Table 5. Marital and secular/religious status of parents of illegitimate children in England 13501500.
Fathers of illegitimate children Row % of fathers whose status is known 21.85 25.83 14.57 33.11 Mothers of illegitimate children Row % of mothers whose status is known 0.54 16.30 1.09 32.07

Category Priest/monk Married layman Unmarried layman Layman, marital status unknown Servant

No. 66 78 44 100

Category Nun Married laywoman Widow Unmarried laywoman Servant Prostitute

No. 1 30 2 59

14

4.64

62 30 184

33.70 16.30 100.00

Total:

302

100.00

persuaded her to leave her husband and go with him to his nephew in Howden, Yorkshire, where they subsequently lived together for two years. At that stage, Robert Smith the nephew, moved (he said) by conscience, cited the pair to the local ecclesiastical court official. They were duly examined, found to be living in adultery, and ordered to separate and abjure each others company. Robert Smith the elder returned to Saltfleet Haven, and Marjorie found a new partner, Thomas Tamworth, in whose household she had another child. This partnership was short; for the past three years, so three deponents alleged, Marjorie had been living in concubinage with a third man called Gerald Preston, who had fathered her third child yet living.29 Marjories eldest son, though he was the child of two married parents, was one of the most mobile of my sample. By the time he was nine, he had been born into one nuclear-like household (where, however, the head of the household was not his blood father), moved into the household of the nephew of his blood father, moved into another mans household and acquired a stepbrother there, then moved into a fourth mans household and acquired a second stepsibling. Two factors that both overlapped with illegitimacy and could operate either separately or together seem to have been particularly potent in producing

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situations where children were liable to live in a variety of non-nuclear family householdsthe clerical status of the father and/or the servanthood of either father or mother. To take the clerical status of the father first: all children fathered by latemedieval clerics (regular or secular) were ipso facto illegitimate and could not legally be brought up in their fathers household. How they were cared for is difficult to say. It may be that some were in fact brought up, at least for a time, in a household where their blood father lived in concubinage with their mother.30 However, there is little evidence to suggest that such a situation was common in England, 13501500. My database includes thirty cases in which clerics were accused of fathering children, but in only three of them is it clear that the mother, and perhaps the children, had lived in the clerical household.31 In at least twelve others it was specified that the mother (and presumably her children) were not living together with the childrens father. For instance, the accusation made in the late 1480s against Thomas Bucke, alias Nox, chaplain of the parish church of St. Sepulchre, London, listed four women with whom he supposedly had had sexual relations, together with the name of the procurress (pronuba) who allegedly supplied them to him. Two were said to have borne his children, but it was another woman who, allegedly, remained in his house for the most part. The only reference to his offspring is that the procuress, moder Mawde, nursed the son of the said Thomas (nutricit puerum eiusdem domini Thome).32 Clerics had strong incentives at least to try to preserve the appearance of a celibate household; priests who flouted rulings against clerical sexual incontinence could be faced with the suspension, or even permanent loss, of their benefice. Thus, John Whitwell, vicar of Wharram le Street, who had apparently maintained a concubinage relationship with his servant, abjured the relationship (and presumably any connection with their child) on pain of loss of his vicarage.33 Furthermore, whether the partners of priests lived with them or not, if the relationship were detected and proved in the ecclesiastical courts, the cleric would invariably be ordered to abjure entirely the company of the woman and presumably of any children born to her. At the very least, then, nuclear-like households including a clerical father were inherently unstable, at risk of being broken up following an ecclesiastical court ruling. What became of clerics children outside their fathers house? Some, presumably, were sent out to nurse or boarded out from an early age, like the Rector of Tuddenhams little son in Norwich priory.34 That this was at least thought to be a common solution to the problem can be seen from insults exchanged in late-medieval London. In the 1480s Elizabeth Brewe accused Thomas Denton

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of defaming her by saying to her, in English, strong hore & monkys hore byddyng me goo to Westmyst[er &] fet home the monkys chyld.35 The problem of childcare for the illegitimate children of clerics could be compounded when the mothers of such children were servants. The cases of the children of John Whitwell and John Donace, briefly outlined in York ecclesiastical court records in 1401 and 1374, neatly illustrate the combined force of clerical fatherhood, servant motherhood, and concubinage in producing shifting households for children. Whitwell, vicar of Wharram le Street, was accused of carnally knowing Agnes, his servant, wife of John Hobson of Coupmanthorp (seruiente sua vxore Johis Hobson de Coupmanthorp), and of churching her for the child conceived between them. Though he originally denied the charge of churching an illegitimate child, he admitted that he had committed adultery with Agnes and that she had lived in his house (cohabitauit in domo eiusdem) for most of the time since his last correction for the misdeed. On the day set for his purgation, however, he confessed that he had celebrated the churching mass; furthermore, Agnes admitted all charges. But where did Agnes and her child live, once it was born? The charge states that she bore the child in the house of Richard Kylnwyk, as if both she and the baby were lodgers at the time (perhaps a strategy attempted to preserve Whitwells reputation). What became of her and her child after the father had been forced to abjure her company is not known.36 Slightly more information survives in the 1374 case against John Donace, chaplain of Driffield, who confessed the charge of holding [Mariora Badde] in his house for five years and procreating more than one child with her. Following the required abjuration, Mariora was committed to the keeping of the vicar of Wetwang. No mention is made of the children. That they were removed from their fathers house is almost certain; whether they continued to live with their mother is unknown.37 As regards servanthood, late-medieval English servants were, at the best of times, highly mobile, as Jeremy Goldberg has demonstrated.38 The position of a pregnant woman servant in her masters house must have been extremely precarious, as the sad case of Alice, servant of John de Man, suggests. In 1485 it was alleged in the consistory court that de Man, a London panmaker, had committed adultery with Alice, his servant, who was expelled from his house, and towards the time of the birth was received again (quae erat expulsa a domo sua & erga tempus puerperij iterato recepta). Her stay was short; allegedly from lack of a midwife, Alice, together with her baby, died in childbirth. But granted Johns evident reluctance to house her, it seems unlikely that he would have welcomed the addition of his illegitimate child to his household.39 The prevalence of servants among the mothers of illegitimate children thus suggests the

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possibility that significant numbers of such children may have either followed their mothers from household to household or have been placed outside the household altogether. What other options were available for illegitimate children of the poor? Some fathers of illegitimate children were brought to church courts and there ordered to provide child support, though whether the children and their mothers were living in single-parent households, or with other men, or in some other arrangement is never specified. Walter Ramsey was ordered in 1445 in the consistory court of the bishop of Rochester to pay for the child he had begotten in fornication with Margaret, servant of John White; ominously, he was also ordered to support the mother, who was living in great poverty (omnino paupertate gravata).40 There is some evidence to show that hospitals such as St. Bartholomews housed mothers of illegitimate children at the time of birth, though what happened to the children afterwards is less clear.41 Alternatively, one London record suggests that city inns (whose contemporary reputation may have been dubious) could form the home; in the 1480s, Anthony Otyndale, an Easterling (probably German), was said to have fathered an illegitimate child, and that child is at the sign of the Bush in Bush Lane (& idem puerum est apud signum le Busch in Buschlane).42 Perhaps significantly, two other cases in the 1470s alleged that illegitimate children were born at le Busche, one the child of Alice, the servant (famula) there, who was said to have fallen pregnant at Ipswich.43 Though we have no evidence to support the argument, it is, of course, possible that in late-medieval London, to lodge and work in an inn, whether as a servant or as a prostitute, might be one of the few ways in which a single mother of an illegitimate baby could keep the child with her and earn money for its support. All these suggestions must be tentative at best; the sparseness of the records forbids certainty, even while suggesting that little help for mothers of illegitimate children was officially forthcoming. Sometimes, both mother and child simply disappeared from the record and, one must suspect, from the fathers household and knowledge altogether. In a case deriving from the 1472 visitation of the prebendal church of Oswaldkirk in Yorkshire, John de Northeby was said to have fathered a child in fornication with Joan, his servant. He appeared before the auditor, admitted the article, and duly submitted himself to penance and correction. But what happened to Joan and her child? A bald note records her exit: Mulier recessit a iurisdiccoethe woman has left the jurisdiction.44 In sum, we may never know exactly what proportion of children in latemedieval England left their natal family (if they ever had a complete one) for the shifting households of stepparenthood, guardianship, single parenthood,

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boarding school, or any of the myriad family circumstances investigated here. Yet we have, it seems to me, good evidence to show that a great range of household forms existed, between which children moved relatively freely. Of the seven main circumstances that tended to drive children from household to householddeath of parent(s), wardship in all its varieties, underage marriage, boarding in a school or convent, illegitimacy, clerical fatherhood, and parental servanthoodtwo stand out as most widespread and important: firstly, the death of a parent, which fairly commonly entailed movement through one or more households or experience of one or more changes in household membership for surviving children; secondly, illegitimacy, especially when linked (as was apparently fairly often the case) with clerical fathers and/or servant mothers. This second factor is harder to detect in the records, and our knowledge of the life circumstances of illegitimate children admittedly remains extremely scanty. Nevertheless, signs of the difficulties of single mothers and their illegitimate children occur sufficiently frequently to keep us alert to the necessity of including them in any consideration of actualrather than idealizedfamily forms in England in the period 13501500. None of the factors I have examined can definitely be shown to apply to anything like a majority of late-medieval British families. It is still arguable that children living in non-nuclear family households were in a minority. But the minority was perhaps less insignificant than orthodox historiography has made it, and the combination of the great range of family forms revealed by close scrutiny of the records should make us take more seriously the need to understand the workings of more than one sort of late-medieval family. Furthermore, I believe that these records allow us glimpses of a different set of assumptions about child-rearing and childhood experience than we can glean from prescriptive or literary sources. Dry tabular figures yet bear witness to the practical expectations and standards of ordinary peoplenot those who read and wrote literary tracts on childhood or education. They suggest that those who had the money to do so were preoccupied with giving physical care to children. Families, friends, and urban communities arranged guardianships for orphans and the fatherless. In general, except in the case of some of the poorest children, someone was concerned to ensure that someone else provided at least the essential elements of childcarefood, clothing, housing, some education, or training. But the protagonists of these stories seemed much less anxious to ensure that children had a stable home life or that they grew up with adults who were close kin to them. Mothers could be overlooked as guardians; children could be taken from house to house as if their emotional attachment to people or places was of no moment. I do not argue here for a new

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form of Ariss theory on the late acknowledgement of childhood and childrens distinctive needs. Yet it is possible that for late-medieval English people, the functions of parenting were, in practice, seen to be of greater moment than the identity of the carers. Lastly, the material raises the question of why so little historical attention has been paid to the life conditions of these children. Admittedly, the records in which they appear are fragmentary, sparse, often badly written, and mostly embedded in a stodgy mass of uninformative text on inheritance, property disputes, or moral nonconformity. But I wonder also if their unpopularity stems partly from the fact that these stories act to destabilize the very well-entrenched orthodoxy that the nuclear family has been not only normative, but normal for at least the past seven hundred years in England. If we took these tales seriously, might we have to revise our whole view on the workings of families and households in England 13501500?

NOTES
1. For example, J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Elisabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1990). See, eg., Katherine J. Lewis, Noel James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips, eds., Young Medieval Women (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999); Barbara Hanawalt, The Childe of Bristowe and the Making of Middle-Class Adolescence, in her Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and articles by Phillips, Voaden, and Cooper in Youth in the Middle Ages, eds. P. J. P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (University of York: York Medieval Press, 2004). Goldberg and Riddy, eds., Youth in the Middle Ages, especially the chapter by Goldberg Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England. See also his Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 13001520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Marriage, Migration and Servanthood: The York Cause Paper Evidence, in his Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 12001500 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 115; and Female Labour, Service and Marriage in the Late Medieval Urban North, Northern History 22 (1986): 1838; Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989); Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Orme sums up this orthodoxy: During the first ten or twelve years of life, [children] were usually at home, able to bond with their parents. Orme, Medieval Children, 9. The main collections I have searched are The National Archives (hereinafter TNA) C1, Chancery Petitions; Canterbury Cathedral Archives (hereinafter CC) X.1.1, C.C.

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

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X.8.1, CC X.8.2, CC X.10.1, CC Y.1.1, CC Y.1.2 , CC Y.1.4; CC Y.4.2; London Guildhall MS 9064/12 Acta Quoad Books, 147073, and 148388; London Guildhall MS 9065 Liber Examinationem; York Borthwick Institute (hereinafter Borthwick) Cause Papers E and F series; York Minster Archives (hereinafter YMA) M2/1b-c, YMA M2/1e, YMA L2/3a, YMA L2(3)c, YMA M2/1f; Norwich and Norfolk Record Office (hereinafter NNRO) DCN 67/111, NNRO DCN79/34; British Library Add. MS 111821, Extracts from the Acts of the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Rochester; Centre for Kentish Studies (hereinafter CKS) Maidstone, Drb/Pa 1 143745 and Drb/Pa 4 147275, 14811500; Sandra Lee Parker & L. R. Poos, A Consistory Court from the Diocese of Rochester, 136364, EHR 106.420 (July 1991): 65265; Lawrence Poos, ed., Lower Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in Late-Medieval England; the Courts of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, 13361349, and the Deanery of Wisbech, 14581484 (Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 2001); Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem (hereinafter CIPM) vols. I (London HMSO 1898), IX (London HMSO 1916), X (London HMSO 1921), and XIX ed. J. L. Kirby (London: HMSO 1992). 7. Though some authors divided the earliest life period into the two stages of infantia (zero to six) and pueritia (seven to twelve)see Burrow, The Ages of Man, esp. 1254; Sears, The Ages of Man; Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 2126. See, eg., Danile Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett, Children in the Middle Ages: 5th-15th Centuries, trans. Jody Gladding (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) chs. 6 and 7, who propose that the average age for apprentices on the Continent in the late-medieval era was fifteen to sixteen. Goldberg found that female servants in York were aged between eleven and twenty-three, with most in their late teenage yearsGoldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle, ch. 4. Hanawalt reported that in late-medieval London the minimum age of entry to apprenticeship was specified as thirteen in the early fourteenth century but tended to rise over the period 13001500, until by the late fifteenth century apprenticeship might be delayed until age eighteenHanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, 113. Borthwick, CP E.76. The exact degree of relationship implied is unclear; R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources (London: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 1965) finds nepos meaning nephew (1462) but also kinsman (from 1253). The fifteenth-century Latin-English wordlist, Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. A. L. Mayhew (London: Early English Text Society, Extra Series 102, 1908) gives Neve, sunnys sone as nepos (p. 306). An entry in the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office vol. XV 17 Richard II, no. 259 (London: HMSO, 1970): 1067 on the death of John de Penfield describes his cousin (the son of his fathers sister) as his nepos. Some kind of cousinship seems most likely. TNA C1/226/47.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. TNA C1/5/41. 13. 14. 15. CIPM vol. XVI, 715 Richard II, no. 785 (London: HMSO 1974): 305. TNA C1/32/5. CIPM vol. XVI, no. 6, pp. 34. Elizabeth was said to be aged seven at the time of the inquisition taken nearly a year after William Playces death; also nos. 105961, pp. 43133. The exact date of Edward Trenchants death is not given, but the relevant inquisition (at

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Southampton) was taken 18 June 1371; Alice was said to have died forty days after William Fyfhyde had taken her in charge. 16. 17. 18. TNA C1/28/38485; dated 38 Henry VI to 5 Edward IV. TNA C1/20/154; dated 431 Henry VI, or possibly 523 Edward IV. Numbers of children exceed numbers of relevant inquisitions because in some cases (where there were female heirs or where Kentish gavelkind was concerned) more than one child heir was named. Comparatively few of these children appear in my table 2 because in most cases the inquisitions do not state where, or with whom, the heirs were living. CIPM X, no. 142 (p. 132).

19.

20. NRO DCN 1/6/47. 21. NRO DCN 1/6/47 Michaelmas 142021; NRO DCN 1/6/49 Michaelmas 142122, almoners accounts, NRO DCN 1/6/51 Mich 142223, NRO DCN 1/6/52 & NRO DCN 1/6/53 (Michaelmas 142324) NRO DCN 1/6/54 (Michaelmas 142425).

22. NRO Hare 2204 Box 194 x 5. 23. TNA C1/19/226a-c.

24. NRO DCN 1/6/59. 25. TNA C1/230/53 f. 95r; the accounts were made after 1493, but refer to the time just after Verneys death in June 1478.

26. TNA C270 33/21; examination on the authority of Richard, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. 27. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1977); Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and its Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America and Japan (London: Arnold, 1980); R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

28. Philippa Maddern, In myn own house: The Troubled Connections Between Servant Marriages, Late-Medieval English Household Communities, and Early Modern Historiography, in Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe, eds. Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 4559. 29. Borthwick CP F110.

30. A few cases of this practice were found by Marie Kelleher, studying the diocese of Barcelona in the period 131228. M. Kelleher, Like man and wife: Clerics Concubines in the Diocese of Barcelona, Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 34960. 31. See, especially, the discussion of the cases of John Whitwell and John Donace, below, nn. 3637.

32. London, Guildhall, MS 9064/2 f. 226r. Since there was no further process on the charge, it is impossible to tell how well founded it was. In all the other cases the living arrangements of the cleric and his partner are unspecified. 33. YMA Register of Comperta, M2(1) f, f. 33r.

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34. See n. 24 above. 35. London Guildhall, MS 9064/2 f. 183r Acta quoad; cf. comparable cases at London Guildhall, MS 9064 f. 89r and 106r and MS 9064/2 f. 226r.

36. YMA Register of comperta, M2(1)f f. 33r. 37. YMA Register of comperta, M2(1)f, f. 14d.

38. P. J. P. Goldberg, Migration, Youth and Gender in Later Medieval England, in Youth in the Middle Ages, eds. Goldberg and Riddy, 8599. 39. London Guildhall MS 9064/2 f 115r.

40. British Library Add. MS 111821 f 9r, 7 June 1445; see also some examples at YMA Consistory Court Book M 2/1b f. 9r, (7 June 1371 Robert son of Hugh de Bradeford alias Fissher and Tizanda de Pykton); f. 9v, (12 June 1371, Thomas Catour of York and Alice de Allerthorp), though the support was to be paid only until the child was three. 41. London Guildhall, MS 9064/1 f. 121r.

42. London Guildhall, MS 9064/2 f. 211d. 43. London Guildhall, MS 9064/1 ff. 27d and 28r.

44. YMA Visitations Book 14721550 L2(3)c, Visitations by Dean and Chapter, 14721550, Visitation commencing 20 November 1472, f. 24d.