As a culture (generalization alert here), we sentimentalize medieval England. At least when we’re not talking about its fleas and flies and plagues and dirt, we do. Still, the sentimentalizing outweighs the fleas-and-flies stuff. We like to think there was a time when nobles were noble, or at least when someone was. Shouldn’t someone be pure of heart in this mess of a world?
Of course they should, and it must’ve happened a long time ago, because we don’t have a lot of purity on show right now. Therefore–this is so obvious I hardly need to say it–it must’ve happened in the middle ages. After all, they did leave us some beautiful pictures, and some yarns we can swallow whole if we work at it.
But medieval England was nothing if not upfront about making a profit, including from that thing we sentimentalize most, childhood.
Okay, if childhood isn’t what we sentimentalize most, it comes right after kittens and puppies.
Irrelevant photo: Not some knight’s horse but a pony living wild on Dartmoor.
Wardship
Let’s say you’re the heir to one of medieval England’s aristocrats but, oops, your father dies while you’re still a minor–less than 21 if you’re male, less than 16 if you’re female. You’re going to become somebody’s ward and they’re going to be your guardian.
Why am I talking about only your father? Because your mother gets shoved off the chess board as soon as your father dies.
I should squeeze an extra fact in here: If you’re male, you get to be the one and only heir, but if you’re female and no male is in line ahead of you, you and any sisters you happen to find will divide the inheritance among you.
Why?
‘Cause that’s how it works.
We have most of the pieces in place now. There you are, heir to a big chunk of land–and land is wealth in medieval England–but too young to control it. You might think your mother could be your guardian but no, sorry, your mother’s good enough to take care of whatever children won’t inherit the land, but not of you, kiddo. That right–and we’ll come to why it’s a right more than a responsibility–goes to your late father’s feudal lord. Who’s likely to have their own best interests at heart, not yours. Having a ward is lucrative and wardships are bought and sold like any commodity. If it’s to their advantage, your guardian may hold onto your wardship. If it’s not, or if they need the money, they’re likely to sell it.
Hold on, though. We shouldn’t talk about wardship as if it’s a single thing. It can be split up, with one person guardianing you, the actual child, and another guardianing–and, entirely legally, profiting from–the land you’ll inherit. And this is right and proper and necessary because as a child you can’t provide military service, and military service is the most important thing feudal lords owe as payment for their land. Whenever the king WhatsApps them, they’re expected to fight, and to bring some set number of armed men with them.
And since too young to be trusted with a smartphone, the adult controlling your land will take responsibility for all that warrior stuff. And, again, since all the gear soldiers need–horses, weapons, armor, food, alcohol–doesn’t come cheap, profiting from your future estate makes sense, right?
Well, it does if you can immerse your mind in the assumptions of a feudal world.
So that’s the land. If the elements of your wardship are divided, though, somebody else will get to decide who raises you. They’ll have the right to arrange your marriage, and since marriage is about connections and land and power, and since you’re a rich heir, the right to arrange your marriage is a game piece worth having. Your guardian might marry you and your riches into their own family. They might marry you into a family they want to build an alliance with. They might sell your marriage.
If all this sounds cold, we haven’t even started. Your custody may not get settled permanently. Your child-self can be taken from one home by armed men and deposited in another. That’s called ravishment. You can then be deposited in some third household because the person who’s taken you isn’t interested in your charming company but in having control of you. You could then be ravished back to the first household, or to a third.
“No provision for feudal heirs was final,” according to Sue Sheridan Walker, in “Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England.”
All the people involved can also go to court, and often do. What little is known about how this worked (and the tales are hair-raising) comes from court records–which, frustratingly, often end halfway through the story, so we never get to find out what happened. What we can pretty well guess is that they don’t end, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Happiness doesn’t seem to have been an expectation, although to be fair when you can only trace a bit of history only through court records you inherit a built-in bias toward the ugliest stories. When it all works smoothly, no one goes to court.
Let’s go back to the mother, though
Mothers get to raise their younger children–who cares about them?–although if the heir dies, the next in line will have to replace him. And an aristocrat’s widow will have the income from her dower lands to support what’s left of her family.
Her what?
Dower lands are generally a third of her husband’s estate, and a widow has a lifetime right to them. When she dies, they revert to the estate–presumably to her son. Since we’re talking about a group of people with a high death rate, both through illness and warfare, a woman might be widowed multiple times, acquiring dower lands as she goes and becoming quite wealthy. So even though she might not have the right to act as her own child’s guardian, as a feudal landlord she might become the guardian of some tenant’s heir, and she might either act as guardian herself or sell the wardship.
When a child’s orphaned, the question people ask isn’t, Who’s the best person to raise this child? It’s, What rules govern the land the child will inherit?
Yes, but…
As an heir, you just might live with your mother if your guardian approves or if your mother buys your wardship, but we can’t assume she’ll think her home is the best place for you. Aristocratic childhoods are short. Children–orphaned or not–are commonly sent to other households at 6 or 7, generally a household that’s a step up the feudal food chain, where they’ll make important connections and get an education. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of who’s literate and who isn’t. The answer will depend on what part of the medieval period we’re talking about anyway. But whatever book learning he acquires, the most important things an aristocratic boy can learn are warfare and what it takes to be an adult in this stratified society–or as one article put it, he needs to “learn breeding.” So even if you stay with your mother, you can’t expect to stay with her for long, and the household you grow up in might turn out to be your in-laws’. Marriages are arranged early and it isn’t uncommon for a very (very) young betrothed couple to grow up together.
Which leads us to ask why, if she’s going to send you away anyhow, your mother might want to buy your wardship, and one possible answer is, for profit: a child can be sold into marriage. Or she might want to marry you off to fulfill an arrangement the family made before your father’s death, which would strengthen or confirm an alliance.
She might also want to control whose home you’re raised in. Marriage and fostering were highly charged political moves.
If she’s one of those mothers who ravish their children–that’s stealing them from their guardians, remember–she might not be doing it because she misses your charming companionship and the crayon artwork you left on the castle walls. A marriage made against your legal guardian’s wishes will still be valid.
And as Walker points out, medieval mothers aren’t necessarily involved deeply with their children. As infants, the kids are in the care of wet nurses. They’re sent away while they’re still young. Books on deportment are singularly silent on what a mother’s duties to a child are.
And finally, there’s another form of guardianship
Medieval England has another way an aristocrat might hold land, though: socage. It doesn’t have the prestige of holding land that you pay for in military service. In fact, it moves us closer to the peasant level. You pay for your land either agricultural service (this isn’t for the aristocracy) or in money. But even though there’s less cachet in holding land this way, you can hold one bit of land in socage and another bit by knight-service, so your socage parcel doesn’t move you down the food chain.
Don’t look for a simple picture.
If you’re the heir to land held under socage tenure, then guardianship goes not to the feudal lord but to your nearest male relative who isn’t entitled to inherit the land. If you’re female, you can contract a marriage without the lord sticking his long feudal nose into the arrangement. (Yes, the source I’m stealing this from said you could contract a marriage by your very own self. You don’t have to depend on someone else doing it for you.) If you’re male, you may find that being the oldest male doesn’t entitle you to inherit the whole parcel of land; it may be divided. It’ll depend on all sorts of complexity that’s above my pay grade. As far as the topic of wardship goes, though, it sounds like you’re less of a pawn than if you’d inherited high-prestige land.
After 1660, knight-service tenure was wiped out and it all became socage.
Notes from the U.K. 
It’s a fascinating subject, isn’t it? A very young Joan of Kent managed to get married and consummate the marriage without her guardians noticing, which has always struck me as very careless of them, since she was the wealthiest woman in England and marriage to her would have been a prize worth paying for.
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What a clever devil she was! And yes, it is fascinating, and I thought about you as I wrote the post–it’s your territory–hoping I got things right. I’ve found my mind wandering back to it this week, wondering how the various guardians actually treated their wards–what their lives were like, who took care of them and in what way. I don’t trust my imagination on the subject. It’s too firmly planted in the wrong centuries. I know kids were still kids, but I also know (thanks, in part, to a book called Centuries of Childhood) that the ways adults thought of them and treated them changed with time and culture.
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My reference books don’t say much about it, but I’m working on a novel that has a ward in it, although she’s not the main character. I’m keeping the details about the guardianship fairly vague, as I don’t really know how it worked. Her guardianship is inherited when her first guardian dies.
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Of course. Like any valuable item, it would be inherited. It’s a system that just begs for corruption, although I wish her better luck than that. The stories that have left a record are, of course, the contentious ones.
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Yes, sometimes things must have worked out well. It was a system that made perfect sense to them, so it must have been successful overall.
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It’s possible that it was successful overall, and I’d agree that it could’ve made sense to them, but I’m not convinced that making sense is a marker of success. Some ways of functioning get baked into a system and are very hard to change, even when the problems are hard to miss. They look like anomalies rather than signs that the system doesn’t work.
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It only worked until soldiers were paid to fight. By the second half of te fourteenth century it, along with many other things, must have seemed increasingly unwieldy and meaningless.
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I never thought about the issue of soldiers getting paid–other than in loot, that is, or ransoms. Interesting twist you’ve thrown into it. Thanks.
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Ravishment? Knight-service? What filth is this!
Anyway, that’s quite an alien world, and those bits of knowledge will help make sense of any relevant histories I encounter in future – past ones have seemed baffling.
So many interesting things to think about – the idea that a male would still be considered a child until he’s 21, but a girl would become a woman at 16, for instance, fitting the entirely different roles of the sexes – men for business and battle; women for male pleasure and incubating progeny.
Despite its complexity, which you indicate you’ve only scratched the surface of, it’s also striking how primitive the system is, little different in its underlying patriarchal principles from those of a late stone-age community. The threat of war is ever-present, so men’s most important asset is their strength and prowess as fighters, while women and children are chattel to be owned and bartered. Some of that is pragmatic, but there’s obviously oppression of the weaker by the stronger underpinning it.
Go feminism! I noticed much of this was about what happens when the man died. When his wife dies … pff? Find another, I guess. And there was mention of a lot of men dying in battle, with the widow accruing assets, but I wonder what the balance was of male and female death – there would be periods of peace when one’s knight-service was almost hypothetical. Many women died in childbirth, but presumably made little difference in terms that mattered – ownership of stuff.
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What I read focused on the numbers of men dying in battle. Women certainly did die in childbirth, although since that didn’t change custody arrangements for their children (you’re right there), it didn’t come into this discussion. Whether the two lists of deaths balanced out–well, no one was keeping statistics, so I doubt anyone knows. Some women did indeed become rich after a string of husbands died, but during part of this period they could be forced to remarry, at which point the husband would control her assets, so it’s certainly arguable that accruing riches wasn’t an unmixed blessing.
It was a pretty brutal period in many ways, many of which you mentioned. Not one I’d want to live in.
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The Church would keep records of deaths, surely? Not that it was a serious kind of wondering that would furnish us with any useful info – most of what goes on in my head is of little use!
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Oddly enough, I hadn’t thought about church records. I just consulted Lord Google, who tells me England’s church records of births, deaths, and marriages only go back to the reign of Henry VIII. I knew that was true of marriage records, but apparently it’s all of them. So I think we’re completely adrift.
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Wow, that’s another bit of amazeballs. I learn so much here! x
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A wild pony on Dartmoor ! My mind flipped back to those ponies near The Great Grimpen Mire in “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Sorry…back to Medieval times.
All these rues and laws and provisions seem like part in the long continuance of keeping women and minors (by whatever definition) from any form of power… Just more of the same…
That doesn’t mean I didn’t find it fascinating.. but it just seeds what is gong on even into this present time..There is more than one way to mean it when they were called “the dark ages.”
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Re power and who’s kept away from it: absolutely. Women, minors, and we should add all classes below the nobility, especially peasants. All for the greater good, you understand. As for the ponies, I’m told that when they stopped using ponies in the mines they turned them loose on the moors, they joined whatever wild ponies there were by then (or maybe I’ve added the wild ponies–don’t trust me on that), and lived the way horses prefer to live, eating grass and creating more ponies. A reward at last after all those years of hard labor in the dark. These are their descendants.
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(Aside : Women are not completely “kept away from power”. There are other examples, think of the sisters and aunts of Karl V.)
“Our” idea of the middle ages as the times when “noble men” roamed the country is a Romantic idea ; a little exaggerated, one could say that the Romantics invented the Middle Ages. In opposition to their modern times dominated by that terrible “enlightenment” (or what finally happened as such), general modernisation, industrialisation ; ad a hefty dose of the new drug called “Nationalismus” (the French destroyed my Reich, böööh !) and you have a very powerful concoction that will turn brains of intelligent men to mush for generations to come.
“History” and “Germanistik” (and the other philologies) are Romantic sciences, and their bastard child is the “Deutsche Volkskunde”, ahem. She’s dead now, and I mourn her heftily.
Man of the Middle ages (and earlier !) was not different from us, it is modern homo sapiens sapiens since – what ? Thirty thousand years ? Some seven hundred years ago man lived (here in Europe !) in a very different framework of values, dependencies, ties / commitments – but within these “systems” he acted rationally, according to the rules. Exactly what a Romantic point of view does not what to accept ; it must all be “sentiment”, heavy feeling and Halbschatten – in short : Sentimental nonsense. The dreaded “rule of the merchants” (Manchester capitalism) began in the high middle ages when the penny-pinchers in Northern Italy adapted book keeping ; where & when starts “modernity” ?
I do not know when the deification of the toddler started. I think they should be kept in farms, boarding schools, until 20, then they are finally allowed into decent society, early enough.
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People of that era were the same as us and yet very different–differnt culture, different assumptions, different way of life. I remember reading (no idea where) that modern people would have more in common with the people of ancient Rome than with the people of the middle ages. I won’t try to argue that one out–it’s not my observation–but it is an interesting way to look at things.
As for toddlerhood, you might enjoy a book called Centuries of Childhood, which picks apart the many different ways childhood has been seen. Yes, children are still children, but–well, again, different assumptions, different cultures.
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This just confirms my stance that I’d love to travel back in time to Medieval England . . . but only as a fly on the wall. Being human then was just too risky.
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I’m with you. Flies probably thrived. Humans, not so much.
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I used to remind my students whenever they waxed poetic about knights and castles that it stunk. Like people literally smelled like sh*t. But I’m just here for the puppies, kittens, and ponies 😉
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To be fair to the middle ages, even the cutest of those puppies, kittens, and ponies produce a fair amount of that.
I like your approach to deromanticizing the era.
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Wow. What a nurturing environment. No wonder they got a reputation for all that “stiff upper lip” stuff.
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I don’t know when the stiff upper lip business started–I suspect much later but I don’t know. Putting that aside, though, it doesn’t sound like the perfect arrangement for raising warm and loving people, does it?
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Interestingly, the surname ‘Ward’ does not derive from your usage of ‘Ward’. This name would have been derived from Ward as a watchman or gatekeeper. This becomes Germaine for us Anglophile Americans because the original camp version of Batman was played by iconic actor Bruce Ward. Batman was a watchman. He was also a orphaned heir to a fortune, fitting both origins, yours and mine.
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Thanks. That’s interesting. The thread you’re following would also lead us to the word warden.
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