Category Archives: History

How the English got hereditary family names

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If that title makes it sound like I’m about to tell you how the alligator got its tail, I sort of am but it’s not alligators and it’s not tails. It’s about a tradition–hereditary family names–that those of us who grew up with it tend to forget isn’t inevitable. 

 

Let’s start with the Anglo-Saxons 

The Anglo-Saxons had a pressing need to tell one Aelfgifu or Aelfstan from all the other Aelfgifus and Aelfstans. Because as far as I can tell the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy all had the same damn names. 

Okay, I admit, I haven’t done a deep dive into the Anglo-Saxons, and the names are one of the things that put me off. But I can still explain the system. Or systems, really. 

Irrelevant photo: evening light, north Cornwall

 

Some people got nicknames: the king Aethelred Unraed translates to Aethelred the poorly advised. Since Aethelred means wise counsel, the pun must’ve been irresistible. He’s gone down in history as Ethelred the Unready, and having gotten named with a pun in one language, it was probably inevitable that he’d get saddled with a parallel pun in the language that picked up from it.

He was neither ready nor well advised in the face of Viking invasions, so the name’s not a bad fit. 

But the nicknames weren’t necessarily insults. The woman who married Harold II, the last of the  Anglo-Saxon kings, was Edith (Aelfgifu in Anglo-Saxon) Swanneck. 

Well, she sort of married him. It was a handfast marriage, not one recognized by the church, which apparently left him free to also marry Edith of Mercia, and that brings us neatly to the second way they could keep track of their Aelfgifus and Aelfstans: by adding a place name to a given name. 

The third way was to use a patronymic–forming a second name from the father’s name, so one of the six Cuthberts in a village might be Cuthbert Edmund’s son. But Cuthbert’s son would be Aelfric Cuthbert’s son. It was a family link but only for one generation. 

What about the Celts, though? They seem to have started out using patronymics–that one-generation use of the father’s name, although the Welsh sometimes listed more than one generation. Cornwall, at least, was slower than England to stabilize last names. One article I found gives examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth century of families changing their names when they moved, sometimes using the place they lived as a last name.

 

Enter the Normans

Hereditary family names were still fairly new in France when the Normans invaded England. (That’s 1066–one of the few dates I don’t have to look up.) Or more to the point, they were new in Normandy, which was where the Normans came from. It was part of France except for the ways in which it wasn’t part of France. It was a duchy within France and didn’t become a French province until the fifteenth century, so– 

Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s also pretty much irrelevant, but I’ll stop here long enough to say that it doesn’t help to see history through modern glasses. Let’s think of it as vaguely French. All we’re talking about is naming practices, and Lord Google assures me that in the eleventh century a hereditary family name was the must-have item for any aristocratic French family. So of course the Normans brought theirs when they crossed the channel.

Your average French family, though? Didn’t have one, didn’t need one. Last names were strictly a prestige item, emphasizing pedigree and unbroken tradition and all that stuff you have to believe matters if you’re going to convince yourself that aristocracy makes sense.

So when the Normans set foot on English soil, they brought those invisible prestige items with them, although just to contradict everything I’ve said, William the Conqueror–the big, bad chief of the Normans–never did have a hereditary last name. Before the invasion, he was William of Normandy or William the Bastard. Then he became William the Conqueror. 

Following that tradition, England’s (and later Britain’s) royal families ran around without surnames until 1917, when the current lot took the name Windsor. Before that, they were known by their dynasties: the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts–

How’s that different from having an inherited last name? Let’s admit that we’re splitting hairs, but it’s what the experts say, so we’ll just nod wisely and play along. 

We have a handy way to check in on how this last name business all played out after the Norman conquest. William–he’s now the Conqueror, not the Bastard or the of-Normandy–demanded an inch-by-inch and tenant-by-landlord survey of his new toy, England, and it took the form of the 1068 Domesday Book, where you find a mix of surnames and no-surnames: Gilbert Tison, Ralph Paynel, and Robert Malet, but also Walter the deacon and Walter the crossbowman. 

 

Commoners 

Over the course of a few centuries, inherited surnames slid downward until every Tom, Dick, and Edith had one. By 1400, most English families were using hereditary last names.

I got drawn into this topic by last week’s post, about Johanna Ferrour, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, who had at least three different last names and three spellings of her first. The system was shifting but the pieces weren’t locked into place yet. 

One source links the spread of family names to those poll taxes that set off the Peasants Revolt Johanna Ferrour helped lead. How else are you going to track who’s paid and who hasn’t? 

When Henry VIII introduced parish registers that recorded each parish church’s births, marriages, and burials, the country lurched further in the direction of hereditary surnames, but even then in some parts of the country a person could still be baptised under one name, married under another, and buried under a third.

The village I live in is small enough that a lot of people know a lot of people but don’t necessarily know their last names. We end up identifying people by their jobs if they’re visible ones, or by their partners, or occasionally by their dogs. We’re not stuck in the medieval era, but the early medieval system is handy.

To be fair, back when I drove cab–this was in the seventies and in the US–we did the same thing. We had an Al and a Big Al. We had a driver known by not just his last name but also by his favorite phrase, Shitya.

 

Women’s last names

Everything I’ve said so far about hereditary names has a built-in problem: it applies to men, not to women. Sorry. I don’t usually write as if men represented humanity at large. What with being a woman and all, I’m constantly getting reminders that it’s inherently problematic to say “people” when you mean men. But men’s last names defined the system and we needed to slot the system into place.

So now let’s talk about women’s names.

In the fourteenth century–around the time of the Peasants Revolt and the poll tax, England was developing the legal theory of coverture, which meant that when a woman married anything she owned was transferred to her husband. (There were a few exceptions, but not many.) The rest of Europe followed Roman law, which gave the husband management of the wife’s property but not ownership. 

She herself also became his property.

Yeah, history’s a bitch and the present has a few problems of its own.

Women took their husbands’ last names when they married. (That wasn’t necessarily true in other countries.) The woman disappeared behind the man. Taking his name wasn’t mandatory and there were exceptions, but it was the default setting–common enough that the exceptions were sometimes written into marriage contracts. This mostly happened among people of property when the woman’s fortune was bigger than the man’s and the woman’s family had no other way for its name to continue. Which by then would’ve been a central concern to any aristocratic family.

 

Inevitability

I started out by saying that those of us who grew up with hereditary family names tend to think the tradition’s inevitable and pretty much universal. But the world’s more imaginative than that. In many places, women who marry keep their own names and no one expects a family to have the same last name. Some cultures continue the tradition of forming a last name from the father’s name–and sometimes if less commonly from the mother’s. In places, people use their given name and that’s pretty much it. The idea of a family name isn’t universal.

 

A bit of personal history

This is pretty much irrelevant, but since we’re talking about how those solid-seeming family names turn out to be fluid, I thought I’d toss it in: names on both sides of my family have been changeable. On my mother’s side, Baruch seems to have become Benedict and Weill became into Wiley.

My father’s family name was Gurievich when my grandfather left Russia for the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, but he wrote it in the Cyrillic alphabet. And/or in the Hebrew alphabet–your guess is as good as mine and possibly better. I’m not sure how many languages he knew–Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, surely–but English doesn’t seem to have been one of them when he landed at Ellis Island. That came later. So some immigration clerk wrote down Hurwitz. What the hell, it had a few of the same sounds. That happened to a lot of immigrants.

When he’d saved up enough money to bring his family over, they became Hurwitzes.

My father was born in the U.S. with the name Hurwitz, but as a young man he played bit parts in the theater, and it was a time when Jewish actors took non-Jewish stage names. He took that a step farther and he changed his last name legally, and a generation and many extra years later here I am with this absurd ultra-English name. When I was younger I thought of changing it back, then asked myself how far back I wanted to go and on which side of the family, although on either side I’d be tracing men’s names, which put me off the idea a bit. I talked about it with one of my aunts and she, who’d changed her own name when she married but had also taken the professional name of Delza (she was a dancer), told me I should stay with the name I had.

“It’s who you are,” she said.

She was right, but it left me wondering who she was.

So I kept the name I was born with, and I’d always assumed it was Anglo-Saxon, but Lord Google assures me of several contradictory origins, including Norman, Anglo-Saxon tinged with northern English and Scottish, and (if AI is to be believed, which it isn’t necessarily), Viking. It seems fitting that I get to choose my own origin for the name I have such tenuous title to. But in case that’s not murky enough and I need a coat of arms–and who doesn’t in these difficult days?–Lord G. led me to nine variations I could claim, and I just can’t decide which suits me best.

I have no idea if any of them is real, and that seems fitting too.

Women in the Peasants Revolt: Johanna Ferrour

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If you’ve read anything about the Peasants Revolt (England, 1381; you’re welcome), the image it calls up is of–okay, I’m being obvious here–peasants, and I’ll bet they’re peasants of the male persuasion. Because if I meant peasants of the female persuasion, surely I’d say something along the lines of peasant-ettes, right? Or following the common format of saying female astronaut, or female judge, I’d call them female peasants, because the people whose job titles don’t come adorned with adjectives–well, they’re male.

Besides, we’re talking about a revolt, and historically speaking the people who fight were male. People who led were male. People who left a mark on the world were male. And so on for another six paragraphs.

Ha. Allow me to introduce you to Johanna Ferrour. Or to Joanna Ferrour. Or if you prefer, to Joan Marchall. Same person, and I’ll get around to explaining that in a minute. What I need to slot into place first is that she was a leader of the Peasants Revolt and is (as far as I can tell, given my status as a non-expert) only recently being reclaimed for history.

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

Let’s get the name issue out of the way

Last names were still a liquid in fourteenth-century England. The tradition of hereditary family names had crossed the English Channel with the Normans in 1066, but married women didn’t have  last names. They were their husbands’ possessions and didn’t need them. As one court put it in 1340, “When a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of.’ “

Thanks, guys. 

As far as I can tell, that business of last names started out by applying only to the people who mattered–the aristocracy–and gradually trickled down from there. The BBC article I’m drawing on here implies that vassals had no surnames. 

That’s a rabbit hole, even if it does look like an interesting one. Maybe I’ll throw myself down it another time. Now, though, let’s sneak ahead of our story for a paragraph: by the fifteenth century, the interpretation of–or at least the verbiage about–marriage had softened and the husband and wife were seen as one person. Except, of course, that person was the husband and the woman took his surname. Legally speaking, she either didn’t exist or barely registered.

In Johanna/Joanna/Joan’s time and among her class, last names (not to mention their spellings) were still fluid and usually drawn from a person’s work or home. She was married to a blacksmith who made horseshoes–a farrier, or ferrour. Or marchall. It all means the same thing.  

Her first name was also fluid. Johanna, Joanna, and Joan were all variations of the same name. Let’s call her Jo. If we don’t, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

 

The rebellion

Although a lot of things contributed to the Peasants Revolt, the cause closest to hand was the imposition of a poll tax, a poll being a head. If you had a head and you were an adult, you paid a tax of 12 pence for the privilege–the same amount the lord and lady of the manor paid for their more luxurious heads.

It was the third poll tax in four years.

What did 12 pence mean to, let’s say, a skilled worker? To answer that, we have to go deep into the realm of guesswork. Too many variables are involved and in a moment of carelessness the fourteenth century’s computer files have been wiped. Still, at a guess, in 1351 a mason might’ve earned 4 pence a day and a carpenter 3. Emphasis on might. So the tax came to three or four days’ pay for a skilled worker and more for a laborer, at a time when keeping a family fed took everything most people had. 

But the revolt wasn’t about just the new tax. The Black Death had left labor in short supply and workers of all sorts in a position to demand better pay. If you’re one of the people who’s paying wages, that’s a Bad Thing. So the government passed the Statute of Labourers, which made it illegal to pay laborers more than they were paid in 1346. 

The final gripe was the enclosure movement, which had started in the twelfth century and was still grinding on. This meant (insert Simplified Explanation warning here) that landowners were seizing common land, which peasants used to use for grazing, gathering firewood, fishing, or–well, it varied from place to place. Landowners across the country were now claiming it as theirs and enclosing it with hedges or fences. For peasants, this was the difference between subsistence and hunger. 

Even though we’re talking about something called the Peasants Revolt, the poll tax and the Statute of Labourers gave townspeople and artisans like Jo and her husband reasons to get pissed off, and the revolt involved not just serfs but also artisans, tradespeople, and tenant farmers–people who rented their land and wanted to shed the feudal inheritance of service their landlords demanded. 

In other words, the king and all his friends and relations were looking at  a large group of pissed-off people. They rose, they marched toward London, destroying tax records and documents that were evidence of serfdom, and one of the interesting things about the Peasants Revolt is that they  don’t seem to have acted like a mob but in a well-organized way. In London, their actions were tightly focused on the people they held responsible for passing and collecting the poll tax. 

If you’re still seeing men when you picture that not-a-mob, consult Professor Sylvia Federico, who argues that women were at the heart of the revolt and did pretty much the same things the men did. They incited crowds. “They were not shy to pick up staffs, sticks, and staves and wield them against perceived oppressors.” One woman was accused of encouraging a group to attack the prison at Maidstone in Kent, another of leading rebels to plunder a number of mansions, leaving servants too scared to return. 

 

Where does Jo come into the picture?

Um, we don’t really know. And neither do the experts. This is the problem with early history in general, but especially about the early history of common people and of women. The lower you sat in the hierarchy, the thinner a record you left behind. Not much is known about the revolt’s leader, Wat Tyler, either. So we can’t blame sexism alone for the lack of information. 

Sorry. I’d love to. Really I would.

What we do know is that Jo and her husband, John, lived in Rochester and owned what a Wikipedia entry (sorry–I try to use more stable sources but I’m desperate) describes as a “not insignificant amount of land.” 

From there, let’s fill in the picture around them: the revolt started in Essex and Kent and swept toward London–not that far if you have a car but a longer trip if you’re on foot with an impromptu army of your fellow furious commoners. Jo and John became part of that army. Court documents describe Jo as “chief perpetrator and leader of rebellious evildoers from Kent.” 

I’ll let the documents tell the tale, because they’re what we have to draw on:

“Joanna wife of John Ferrour of Rochester in the county of Kent went as the chief perpetrator and leader of a great society of rebellious wrongdoers from Kent on Thursday 13 June 1381 to the Savoy in the county of Middlesex and, as an enemy of the king, burned the said manor; she seized a chest containing £1000 and more belonging to John, Duke of Lancaster [you may know him as John of Gaunt], and then she put the said chest into a boat on the Thames and made off with it, all the way to Southwark, where she divided the gold between herself and others.”

How much money was £1,000? In 2024, it would’ve been something along the lines of $1,000,000, although why we’ve changed from pounds to dollars there is anybody’s guess. 

“On Friday 14 June 1381 the said Joanna went as head of the said company to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England and made a fire there and completely burnt that house, and carried off two horses loaded with wool worth 6 marks. And the same Joanna together with others went as chief leader to the Tower of London, and laid violent hands first on Simon, lately archbishop of Canterbury, and then on [treasurer] Brother Robert Hales, lately Prior of St John of Jerusalem in England, and she dragged them out of the Tower of London and ordered that they be beheaded.”

The same acts are also attributed jointly to her and her husband. And no, she or they didn’t burn down a building where the sick were cared for. Hospital didn’t take on that meaning until the sixteenth century, and it didn’t mean a place to look after the needy until the fifteenth. 

It’s anybody’s guess what Jo and John’s roles were before the moments when they appear in the historical record, as is what happens afterward. That’s the problem with history: you have to work with the facts. All the damn time. And when they’re scarce you don’t get to make them up.

John was acquitted of the charges against him. Jo wasn’t executed, which implies that she was acquitted, although there’s no record of it. Both their names appear later on the paperwork for houses they gave to Walter Northampton for we’ll never know what reason. You have to be alive for that, so let’s take it as evidence that they lived on after the revolt, unlike most of its leaders. 

How’d they manage that? John might’ve saved the life of the young Earl of Derby, Henry Bolingbroke, who went on to be Henry IV. He also might not have. Some sources name the man who saved Bolingbroke as John Ferrour of Southwark, not of Rochester. One has the kid’s life being saved by a guard named John Ferrour, which wouldn’t be the John Ferrour we’re following. Basically, we’ll never know, but it’s unusual that any leaders of the revolt survived. Most were hanged, with additional killings in Essex, where the revolt hadn’t quite died out. 

No records of women being executed after the revolt  have been found. 

 

And so . . . 

. . . we leave Jo and John in the middle of their story. They lived on. They gave someone a house. John was accused of murder later on and pardoned. And that’s about all we’ve got. The work of reclaiming history’s lost figures usually comes down to filling in a picture around them and leaving the center, where they should stand, empty. 

*

I’ve focused on Jo here, and to some extent on John, which leaves the Peasants Revolt in the background. If you want the story of the revolt itself–and it’s an interesting bit of history–you can jump to an earlier post, where it’s foreground. 

Samuel Pepys, the Great Fire of London, and a wheel of parmesan cheese

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In 1666, Samuel Pepys’ maid woke him up, telling him about a fire. To which he said something along the lines of Ho hum and went back to sleep. London was a flammable town, full of wooden houses. Fire was nothing new. This one was far enough away that he wasn’t about to let it wreck a good night’s sleep. We know this because he wrote it–and endless other details of his life–down and his diaries survived him. I’ll be quoting from them extensively here. They’re online, and although each day’s entry has its own URL, I’ve only given a link to the first day. Start there. You’ll be fine.

The fire. With thanks to Wikimedia Commons

 

The next day

The next morning, September 2, the fire still didn’t look like anything to worry about, but “by and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.” 

Okay, he starts to take this seriously and walks to the Tower of London “and there got up upon one of the high places, . . . and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.” 

In other words, he thought the era-appropriate equivalent of Holy shit, this is serious and walked to the Thames, where he got a sense of just how serious. 

What he saw was “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters [they were flat-bottomed barges] that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. . . .

“Nobody, to my sight, [was] endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire . . . and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.”

 

The king and the firebreak

Pepys was a member of parliament, worked for the Navy Board, and was the kind of guy who could talk his way in to see the king and the Duke of York, which he did, telling them “that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire.”

Pulling down houses was pretty much the only way to stop a spreading fire. London had no professional firefighters and even if they had I doubt the technology of the day would have let them shoot any serious amount of water at a burning house. The way to keep a fire from spreading was to destroy buildings that weren’t on fire, creating a firebreak, and the king ordered the lord mayor to do that, with the D of Y offering to send soldiers if they were needed.

Off Pepys trotted to find the mayor and in the midst of this madness, with luxury goods being hauled away in carts and on people’s backs and sick people being carried in beds, he actually found him, and the mayor, basically, said, Nobody listens to me anyway, I’ve been pulling down houses all night, I don’t need any soldiers, and I’m going to bed.

He might’ve been pulling down houses all night–I don’t know–but when the fire was first starting to spread and he was asked to do exactly that, he refused. If he gave the order, the city would have to pay for the houses it had destroyed. If he waited for the king to give it, guess who had to pay then? 

Anyway, king’s order or no king’s order, he toddled off to bed.

At this point you’d expect Pepys to rush back to the king and the D of Y so they could do what the mayor wouldn’t, right? 

Nah, it was noon and he went home, where he had guests. They were all worried about the fire, “However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry, as at this time we could be.”

Then he went out and found the king and the D of Y, who were on the river, and they gave the order to pull houses down. “But little was or could be done, the fire coming upon them so fast . . . [and] the wind carries it into the City.”

Translation: this, I think, is where the wind changed direction.

By that night, Pepys was packing up his own house and worrying about where to put his gold. 

“I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place. And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts also there. . . .

“About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart; and, Lord! to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding, and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things. I find Sir W. Rider tired with being called up all night, and receiving things from several friends. . . . I am eased at my heart to have my treasure so well secured.”

 

At last we get to the cheese

“Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine [it would’ve been in barrels–in other words, large and heavy], did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”

Why would he bury a parmesan cheese? Because it was a luxury item. Even now, when you can find the stuff in any supermarket, a 36 kilo wheel of good parmesan can cost $1,450. Back then? Sorry, can’t quote you a price, but a lot. It was rare, it was valuable, and his would’ve weighed 80 to 90 kilos. 

What’s that in pounds and ounces? Make yourself a cup of coffee and multiply by 2.2. 

You’re welcome. You really don’t want me doing the math.

Are you getting the sense that this is one whale of a big hole they’ve dug? Would you like to bet that when he says they dug the pit, that means they had their servants do it for them?

But back to Pepys himself. 

“This afternoon, sitting melancholy with Sir W. Pen in our garden, and thinking of the certain burning of this office, without extraordinary means, I did propose for the sending up of all our workmen from Woolwich and Deptford yards (none whereof yet appeared), and to write to Sir W. Coventry to have the Duke of Yorke’s permission to pull down houses, rather than lose this office, which would, much hinder, the King’s business. So Sir W. Pen he went down this night, in order to the sending them up to-morrow morning; and I wrote to Sir W. Coventry about the business, but received no answer.

“Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than anything, but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it, though it kindled nothing almost.”

 

Aftermath

“Could not . . . find any place to buy a shirt or pair of gloves, Westminster Hall being full of people’s goods, those in Westminster having removed all their goods, and the Exchequer money put into vessels to carry to Nonsuch. . . . A sad sight to see how the River looks: no houses nor church near it, to the Temple, where it stopped. At home, did go with Sir W. Batten, and our neighbour, Knightly (who, with one more, was the only man of any fashion left in all the neighbourhood thereabouts, they all removing their goods and leaving their houses to the mercy of the fire), to Sir R. Ford’s, and there dined in an earthen platter — a fried breast of mutton; a great many of us, but very merry, and indeed as good a meal, though as ugly a one, as ever I had in my life. . . . Thence down to Deptford, and there with great satisfaction landed all my goods at Sir G. Carteret’s safe, and nothing missed I could see, or hurt.”

The next day he was able to borrow a shirt and wash. 

The fire burned four-fifths of the city: more than 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 livery company halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Pepys’ house did not burn and in a later entry he writes about unearthing his wine but doesn’t mention the cheese. Since he didn’t complain about losing it, we can probably assume the fire didn’t turn it into a giant grilled cheese sandwich, minus the bread.

*

For an exploration of how differently the rich and the poor experienced the fire and its aftermath, watch Ruth Goodman and Rob Rinder’s 90-minute documentary The Great Fire of London.

Shipwrecks and wreckers: a bit of English history

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Any coastal community sees storms deliver shipwrecks to its shores, and if times are hard no community lets those deliveries go to waste. 

Okay, even when times aren’t hard. As far as I can figure out, humans are wired to accept a free lunch. Or a free shipping container of slightly salted whatever. 

Before we go on, though, I need to build a wall between two words: Wreckers are people who scavenge what they can from wrecked ships or from the cargo that floats ashore. Wrecking is an activity that probably never happened. The Cornish are said (although not by the Cornish themselves, in my experience) to have used lights to lure ships ashore where they’d wreck. There’s not only no evidence that anyone actually did that, it’s questionable that it would even work. But it still means I can’t use the word wrecking here, since I’m talking about what did actually happen.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the right to wreck–wreck here meaning to scavenge a wrecked ship. And lets watch me jump through linguistic hoops to avoid the word wrecking.

 

The rocks where the L’Adaldise wrecked. (See below. It’ll all make sense.)

The right of wreck

If Wikipedia’s right on this (it has a good overall record even if it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness), the right of wreck, or jus naufragii if we’re going to pretend we know Latin, is a medieval European custom rather than an actual law. 

It was based on the idea that if a ship wrecked it was because god got mad at the crew for–well, something, clearly, so he drove their ship ashore. That made the ship, its contents, and in the early days its crew the property of the finders. Because god had set it all up that way.

Gradually that business about enslaving the crew dropped away, but claiming whatever was left of the ship and its contents? That continued powerfully enough for the Church to condemn it from the 12th century into the 16th.

If you want to know what’s actually happening in a time and place, look at what gets condemned or outlawed multiple times. It’s not foolproof–centuries of hysteria over witchcraft really doesn’t prove the existence of witches–but it’s still a good place to start.

Starting in Norman times, the English crown owned the land–the whole damn land–and that’s relevant because ships tend to wreck where the sea meets the land. The king could and did hand chunks of land to his followers, but it was still his and if one of them pissed him off too badly he could take it back. We could find a parallel there to god getting mad and wrecking a ship because, never mind human ownership, it’s his to wreck, but it won’t stand up to rough handling so let’s not push it too far.

So the king owned the country, even the parts other people owned. Try not to think about it too hard. Just nod your head and agree that of course he got to eat his cake and discover that it was still there, on the plate. He was the king, after all.

What matters for us is that he also owned whatever washed ashore, and he could and did assign it to others, just like he owned land and assigned it to others. 

 

The right to complicate the situation

Edward I (1239 –1307; you’re welcome) introduced a law stating that”where a man, a dog, or a cat escape quick [in other words, alive] out the ship,” the ship wouldn’t be considered a wreck, and neither would its contents. Its owners had a year to claim their property–minus fees, rewards, and droits.

What’s a droit? It seems to involve money, law, and ownership. Beyond that, it’s a rabbit hole. 

The new law kicked off all sorts of arguments and lawsuits about what actually happened in this, that, or the other shipwreck. Did everybody die? Was the cat alive and curled up at someone’s fireside? Was this black cat at fireside the black cat who used to be the ship’s black cat? In other words, was the ship a “true wreck” or was it not?

The abstract of an academic paper that I can’t get full access to (sorry) says, “Different views coexisted about the legality and propriety of shoreline activities, whether salvagers worked with or against established authority, whether wrecking constituted a service, a custom, or a crime, and whether common lawyers or the civil lawyers of the Admiralty had jurisdiction.”

In other words, the law complicated things. And you might want to notice that the paper’s using the word wrecking there in exactly the way I’m not, but I’m pretty sure they lost points for it and I haven’t. 

 

But let’s stop following the story chronologically . . .

. . . because I’m having trouble unscrambling this egg. The point I want to get to is that somewhere along the line the crown gave seaside landowners the right to salvage whatever god (in his fury) had smashed onto their bit of the king’s shoreline, and this turned out not to be simple either, because the king (in his wisdom) had given the right to the owners of both manors and of hundreds.

Hundreds? The hundred was a political unit smaller than a county, and a manor was a large estate of no specified size but smaller than a hundred (at least usually; I can’t guarantee that it always was) and larger than the egg I can’t unscramble. So a hundred could contain multiple estates. 

In other words, the king just granted the same right to overlapping landowners. This is not a recipe for harmonious living. Cue an assortment of lawsuits, and if you’re interested in them follow the link just above, because we’re headed off in another direction:

If a tenant found a wreck, they were expected to let the lord know, in return for which they’d get half the goods and the lord would get the other half. That amount would’ve ranged from the piddling to the spectacular, but ordinary people lived close to the edge and no find was too piddling to pass up.

What happened if the tenant didn’t notify the lord? In a case in Cornwall, two tenants carried off 54 gallons of wine, were caught, and were fined, although the source I’m relying on doesn’t say how much. More than the wine was worth, I’m sure. 

What we can’t know is how often tenants weren’t caught, because not getting caught leaves no record.

 

Then the laws got tougher

In 1714, anyone who boarded a wreck without permission or got in the way of the crew salvaging their cargo faced fines and imprisonment. After 1753, they faced the death penalty.

If you want to blame someone for that, I’m told you can blame the philosopher John Locke, who argued for the sacredness of property. The idea caught on among (no surprise here) people who had property, and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to say that the purpose of government was to protect and preserve property. Punishments for crimes against property became harsher, usually following some local event that the great and the good could whip themselves into a state of outrage over. Soon a person could face the death penalty for anything from picking pockets to poaching to stealing livestock. 

And here’s a spot where I have to stand on my head to avoid using the word wrecking: scavenging from a wreck went on the list. 

If you’re not in a mood to blame John Locke for that, you can blame the East India Company, which had plenty of property to consider sacred and had lost some expensive cargoes off Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Along with a few other companies who had a lot to gain, it lobbied to change what was still essentially a medieval law on wrecks. 

 

The aftermath of one wreck

In 1767 a French ship, L’Adaldise, wrecked off Cornwall, not far from where I live. To be clear, I wasn’t there. I’m not that damn old. I not only hadn’t been born yet, neither had my grandparents. I only come into the story because I know the area. 

A hundred people rushed to the shore, according to the account. At the time, the nearest village would’ve been very small indeed and (if AI can be believed, and it sometimes can) the whole parish (4,000 acres) had a population of 700. I’m guessing it would’ve taken a while to collect 100 people. But Cornwall was a poor county, and a wreck washing ashore could well have meant the difference between eating and not eating.

However many gathered, a lot of people rushed to the shore. Some were salvaging for the lord of the manor and some for themselves, or so the article I’m relying on says. Some had axes and chopped into the hold to get at the cargo, but they also carried off masts, anchors, cables, ropes, and anything else that could be put to use. 

Then everyone went home, including an elderly farmer, William Pearse, who for reasons that aren’t clear to me was the only person arrested (at home) and charged with wrecking. Under the new law, he faced the death penalty. He was held in Launceston jail, which the British in their inexplicable wisdom spell gaol. Eight years later, a reformer described the jail this way:

“The Prison is a room or passage twenty three feet and a half by seven and a half, with only one window two feet by one and a half;—and three Dungeons or Cages on the side opposite the window; these are about six and half feet deep…They are all very offensive. No chimney: no drains: no water: damp earth floors: no Infirmary . . . The yard is not secure; and Prisoners seldom permitted to go out to it. Indeed the whole prison is out of repair. . . . I once found the Prisoners chained two or three together. Their provision is put down to them through a hole in the floor of the room above. . . . And those who serve them there, often catch the fatal fever . . . a few years before, many Prisoners had died from it.”

Pearse was tried in Bodmin, and if he had any witnesses to defend him they would’ve had to make a rough trip across the moor, but no records of the trial exist so we can’t know. I can’t help wondering, though, how anyone could’ve appeared as a witness in his defense without having to admit that they’d been a participant. 

What we do know is that Pearse was convicted and sentenced to death, and so were six others that week, all for theft of one sort or another–except, possibly, for the one person convicted of house-breaking. 

 

Appeal

Death sentences were often handed out and then commuted them to transportation by the judge. (At the time, transportation was to the American colonies.) Four death sentences from that week were commuted, but not Pearse’s, and the elite of Launceston rallied behind him, campaigning for a royal pardon. 

Why did the local gentry rally behind a poor man? Possibly because they had a lot to gain from wreckers and a lot to lose if the crackdown held. Pearse was being used as a test case.

Campaigning for a pardon involved lawyers, and lawyers involved money, something Pearse didn’t have. It’s not clear who footed the bill, but the local gentry sound like a fair guess. 

Whoever was paying, Pearse now had a high-powered legal team, and local politicians were appealing for a pardon, arguing variously that he hadn’t taken much (“an inconsiderable quantity of rope” and a bag of cotton), that he wasn’t guilty, that the witnesses against him had lied, and that local people were deeply concerned about the case. Pearse’s age could also have been expected to argue for a pardon, and in any case the statute called for the death penalty only if violence was involved. 

Meanwhile, Pearse sat in that small, foul jail in Launceston.

Following standard procedure, the matter was referred back to the judge who’d condemned him (the logic was that he knew the case best), and the judge wrote, “‘As there were many common people in Court, I took the opportunity of inveighing very warmly against so savage a Crime, and of declaring publickly that no Importunities whatsoever should induce me to reprieve the Criminal.”

Pearse did not get his pardon.

It’s not irrelevant that the judge was also a legal representative for the East India Company. Remember them? The good folks who lobbied for the harsher law?

Pearse was the first person hanged as a wrecker under the new statute.

 

Current law

That doesn’t really take us to the present day, but let’s hit fast forward. Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1995, you have to report a wreck or any materials from a wreck to none other than the Receiver of Wreck. That could get you a salvage award, which will vary depending on the value of the wreck and what you had to do to rescue it. What you can’t do anymore is call in the entire village and cart everything away like ants carrying an entire picnic home to the nest.

Good manners in medieval England

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Medieval England isn’t famed for its polish, its manners, or its cleanliness. (Neither is medieval Europe, but it’s not our subject.) If you want to be a contrarian, though, and say, Poopash, they were civilized enough to have books of etiquette, you’d be right. They did have books of etiquette and I’ve stumbled over one from the early 1200s that does indeed prove they valued good manners. It also underlines in screaming red ink how the definition of good manners can change from one time and place to another. Not to mention the differences between the modern mindset and the medieval one. 

Allow me to throw you into the deep end of the pool.

Irrelevant photo: A morning glory–also called bindweed.

 

The Book of the Civilised Man, by Daniel Beccles

Not much is known about Daniel Beccles except that he wrote The Book of the Civilized Man, medieval England’s first known book of etiquette. He might’ve been in Henry II’s retinue for more than 30 years. That leaves open the possibility that he might not have been, but “more than 30 years” is pretty specific for a might, so let’s assume he was.

Why take the risk?

Because for our purposes it doesn’t matter.

Beccles’ book took the form of a 3,000-line poem in Latin. Or 2,800 lines according to a different source. I not only haven’t counted them myself, I haven’t gotten my hands on the full manuscript, although an English translation is bumping around out there somewhere. I’m working, as I usually do, from secondary sources.

Sorry, folks. I’m not a historian, just somebody sitting on a couch.

The book was addressed to boys and young men who were being trained in noble households–or as Beccles put it, “untrained boy-clerks”–and its existence speaks to a society where the rules of behavior were changing fast enough that people needed a guide. 

Let’s break the advice into categories. It gives me something to do. 

 

Religion and so forth

Predictably, given the time and place, a lot of the advice has to do with religion, or as one of the sources I’m using puts it, “a man’s duty to God. He should obey the law and the Commandments; he should be wary of vices and pursue virtues. He should endeavour to perform pious works, love learning and behave in church. He should think of the inevitability of death, the joys of Heaven and the terrors of Hell.”

That’s generic enough that it could’ve come from central casting, and the business of vice and virtue reminds me of someone whose father, after a bit of hemming and hawing, gave him this advice about–well, who knows? Possibly sex but possibly life in general: “Beware the pitfalls of life.” 

Panaiotis, I’m grateful to you for passing that on to me. My life is impossibly richer for knowing it, and I’m always grateful for a laugh.

Sorry. Rabbit hole. And to be fair to Beccles, that’s a summary. He seems to have been more specific than that. 

“If you want to be rude to someone, take a close look at who you are, whom you are speaking to, and what their circumstances are,” he wrote. 

That might sound like he’s advising a compassionate awareness of other people’s situations, but I have a hunch he’s warning the reader against pissing off anyone who’s more powerful. See the section on hierarchy for the reasons I think that. Other advice is unambiguously kind.

“If fickle Fortune favours you, fortuitous one, do not mock those bereft by her.”

“If anyone threatens those near him with cruel misfortunes, or if someone wicked cruelly holds sway over his neighbours, kicking and clawing, and cultivating wickedness among them, stand up to thwart his evil violence alongside the neighbours.”

“Do not oppress anyone for sport.”

For good sober reasons, it’s okay.

“Offer relief to the hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, wandering, and imprisoned in whatever way will set them right.”

We could find worse advice without having to look far. 

As for behaving in church, at least part of his advice is to stay awake.

 

The hierarchy

Just as religion shaped every thought about good and evil, hierarchy shaped every thought about whatever was left after that, and a lot of Beccles’ book is about how to behave to people who are higher up the ladder. 

“Eventually, it would be time for the inferior to wait on the lord as he went to bed. . . . When he sits on the privy in the usual way, take in your hands hay or straw, pick up two big wads of hay in your fingers and press them well together. You should prepare to give them to your patron when he wants them. Let the wads be given to him as you stand, not bending the knee. If two together are sitting on a privy, one should not get up while the other is emptying himself.” 

Have I mentioned that the medieval idea of privacy was different than ours? Or possibly nonexistent? And that they were pretty matter-of-fact about the human body and the various things it does. 

“If you are acting as a servant, stand by the bedside; cover your lord’s naked body.”

“Do not hunt for fleas on your arms or bosom in front of the patron or in front of the servants in the hall. . . . In front of grandees, do not openly evacuate your nostril by twisting your fingers.”

“Eating at the table of the rich, speak little.”

 

Eating

“Do not be a nose-blower at dinner nor a spitter; if a cough attacks you defeat the cough. . . .If you want to belch, be mindful to look at the ceiling.”

“Spoons which are used for eating do not become your property.”

“If a fat morsel lies in the dish in front of your companion, do not touch it with your finger, for fear that fingers will be pointed at you as a boor. . . . When your fellow drains his cups, cease eating. Beware of shouting ‘Wassail’ unless you are bidden to do so. While food is visible in your mouth, let your mouth savour no drink; while food is hidden in your mouth, let your tongue not minister to words. The morsel placed in an eater’s mouth should not be so big that he cannot speak properly if he needs to do so. Beware of drinking wine greedily like Bacchus. . . ..Sitting at table as a guest, you should not put your elbows on the table. You can put your elbows on your own table but not on someone else’s.”

 

The hall

When Beccles talks about the hall, he’s not talking about hallways–those corridors you walk through to get to some room where the action’s taking place. A medieval hall was where the action took place. Initially, it was where everyone ate and slept, but even after the lord and his family drew away from the communal mayhem to a room of their own, it remained the center of a lord’s home. 

“Let not a brute beast be stabled in the hall, let not a pig or a cat be seen in it; the animals which can be seen in it are the charger and the palfrey, hounds entered to hare, mastiff pups, hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and merlins.”

I apologize to any cats who subscribe to Notes. History comes in many shades of bitter. No point in pretending otherwise.

But since we already have horses in the hall, let’s acknowledge the limits: “When you are about to leave, let your cob [that’s a horse] be at the door. Do not mount him in the hall.”

 

The body

In case you didn’t believe me about the medieval era being frank about the body:

“When you are hungry and ready to eat, first empty your bowels. Afterwards, an attendant should give you a washcloth and water. If it is winter, you should be given warm water. The washcloth should be white and the water should be from a clean stream.”

Why does the you get a washcloth and water but the lord hay and straw? I’m tempted to blame different translations but haven’t been able to convince myself. A cloth is a cloth. Hay is hay. I have no explanation. It doesn’t make moving up to lordly status sound appealing.

“Do not get up after the meal to urinate in the bushes, nor to void your bowels, unless nature compels you. Guests, messengers, and servants should not urinate on the premises. The master of the house can urinate in his own home. Guests may urinate indoors, if they so wish, at night after they have retired.”

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if others notice any of your smelly filth. If it happens that your intestines are caught in a windstorm, look for a place where you may relieve them in private.”

“Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate.”

 

Sex

Beccles wasn’t a fan of women. Common sense in his era insisted that women were over-sexed, and Beccles was full of common sense. 

“When tempted by sweet words, even a chaste, good, dutiful, devout and kindly woman will resist scarcely anyone,” he wrote. Basically, she’s ready to fuck “a cook or a half-wit, a peasant or a ploughman, or a chaplain. . . . What she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff. . . . Such are the things that charm and delight women.”

Which is news to me, but what do I know? 

“Whatever your wife does, do not damage your marriage. . . . If you are a cuckold, do not whisper a word about it. . . . When you are a cuckold, learn to look up at the ceiling.”

That’s the second time looking at the ceiling has come up. If you know what was written on those medieval ceilings, do let me know.

“If the wife of your lord turns her eyes on you too often and wantonly looses shameful fires against you, letting you know that she wants to have intercourse with you; if she says, ‘The whole household and your lord, my husband, shall serve you for ever, you alone shall be my darling, you shall rule everything, everything which belongs to you lord shall be open to you’ . . . consult me, my son; what I counsel is planted in your heart; between two evils, choose the lesser evil; your safer plan is to feign illness, nerve-racking diseases, to go away sensibly and prudently.”

He also warns his reader against having sex with holy women, his godmothers, or relatives. He should avoid men or boys who masturbate or have sex with animals or boys. 

If you’re getting a picture of our lonely boy-clerk surrounded by temptation but forbidden to join in, take heart. Beccles didn’t exactly approve of going to prostitutes but he was resigned enough to give advice on how to visit, and that sounds pretty joyless as well–not just for the prostitute but for the boy-clerk.

“If you are overcome with erotic desire when you are young and your penis drives you to go to a prostitute, do not go to a common whore; empty your testicles quickly and depart quickly.”

If I’m reading this right and if Beccles is anything to judge by, we’re looking at a culture that’s frank about sex and frank about the body but at the same time repulsed by both. 

 

What about kids?

You’ll find no joy there either.

“They cover their clothes with ashes, they make them dirty, they dribble on them; they wipe their noses flowing with filth on their sleeves.”

The evolution of medieval warfare

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The feudal world–generalization alert here–glorified warfare. Or at least the folks at the top did. Why wouldn’t they? They got to the top and they stayed there because they were armed and dangerous. If we want to explain their role nicely, it was to protect the country from invaders. If we’re not in a mood to be nice, the English aristocracy was there because they’d been the invaders, killing people and taking over what had once been theirs. And because they were too big and scary to get rid of–not that some of the Anglo-Saxons didn’t try.

But they were happy to fight any new invaders. And sometimes each other. And occasionally to be the invaders in other people’s lands. 

Yes, if you didn’t mind a bit of bloodshed and you were born on the winning team, it was a fine old time to be alive.

Yet another relevant photo: Stained glass window with what I assume to be a knight in the centerfold. And if it’s not a knight (is that a halo behind him?), what the hell, he’s on a horse. Close enough. From Canterbury Cathedral.

 

The cult of knighthood

To be part of a class defined by warfare meant training from childhood. I’m leaning heavily here on Ian Mortimer’s book (remember books?) Medieval Horizons, and he writes about the aristocracy “deriving satisfaction” from war and “committing acts that caused enormous suffering but which they regarded as their right.”

They were enthusiastic enough about fighting that when they didn’t have a war at hand,they needed to be kept occupied, and raids were a good training ground for warfare–not to mention a good way to keep a restless set of knights amused. The English raided Wales and Scotland repeatedly, although the raids on Scotland seem to have been written up as invasions and the Scottish invasions as raids. That may be about numbers and it may be about nationalism, but the line between war and raid looks a bit blurry to me.

I’m less certain about Wales. Sorry.

When raids were out of season, restless aristocrats could always recreate war in the form of a joust, and in the earlier medieval period we’re not talking about the kind of fancified, one-on-one, controlled jousts we see in movies. Those came later. In 1341, Sir William Douglass (whoever he may have been) challenged the earl of Derby (he was the earl of Derby, that’s who he was) to a joust. The conditions were that no one wear armor and that they all fight with sharpened lances. 

You’d do the same on a rainy Saturday when you’d gotten tired of listening to some damn minstrel plunk away on the lute. You know you would.

Twelve men fought on each side. Three were killed and there’s no record of how many were injured. The survivors agreed it was a great party and wrote very nice thank-you letters, saying, “Let’s do it again soon.”

The culture of chivalry, with its tales and songs and myths, glorified it all. It was all about personal courage, personal honor, personal strength. 

From what I’ve found, serfs and associated non-nobles did get drafted into the wars the aristocrats started and commanded. They were foot soldiers, archers, and whatever else was needed. But they were the backup band, not the lead singers. The aristocracy hogged the spotlight.

Not to diminish that business of personal honor or anything, but real warfare, as opposed to jousts, could also be profitable. If you captured a knight (or–jackpot!–the king), you could hold him for ransom. It sounds like a board game, doesn’t it? I’ve seen references to ransoming archers as well, so commoners may have been ransomable, but the emphasis is pretty clearly on aristocrats, and the higher up the food chain the captive was, the bigger the ransom. 

Historians argue about when and why that business of ransom began. It’s an interesting rabbit hole and we’re not going down it but you’re welcome to. Let me know when you get back and I’ll put the kettle on.

Another source of wartime profit was looting, and I’m not sure what more I can say about that. Soldiers took stuff, but to be fair, only when they could. 

 

Attempts to rein in the brutality

A few winds blew in the direction of toning down the brutality of war. In the tenth century, the Peace of God movement– 

Well, okay, not a lot is known about the Peace of God movement, but it started in southern France and popped up at assorted Church councils. 

Back to the Peace of God movement, though. It was a response to the inability of, specifically, France’s Carolingian dynasty to impose anything like order, but more widely it was an effort to tone down the violence of the period. It urged combatants to make a distinction between soldiers (legitimate targets) and non-combatants. Warriors were not to commit rape and not to kill women, children, churchmen, or merchants. 

A bit later, the Truce of God movement tried to ban fighting from sunset on a Wednesday until dawn on a Monday as well as during Lent and Advent, and if that strikes you as bizarre, think of it as a reminder of how different the medieval mindset was from the modern one. The ban parallels the restrictions on when a person could have sex or eat meat. 

No, I didn’t make that up. 

The Truce of God movement would’ve made perfect sense at the time, even to people who disagreed with it.

Two English kings, Edward III and Henry V, also tried setting some limits. Edward ordered that “no town or manor was to be burnt, no church or holy place sacked, and no old people, children, or women in his kingdom of France [France and England were hopelessly tangled at the time] were to be harmed or molested.” Henry’s ordinances instructed his soldiers to protect churches and religious buildings–not to steal from them; not to harm or capture clergymen and -women (or maybe that’s women and clergymen; Medieval Horizons’ wording leaves it open); not to take clergymen hostage unless they were armed and hostile; and not to rape any women.

The instructions are more interesting as an indication of what was happening than as a list of what they managed to stop. Still, warfare was changing, although not in the ways either movement hoped for.

 

The decline of the knight

Knights’ effectiveness depended on the massed charge, which could overwhelm a defense, but in the fourteenth century the knight started to lose his status as hero of the battlefield. In 1314, Robert the Bruce (Scotland; real person; also a movie that I remember as endless) scattered sharp metal gizmos–caltrops in case you care–across the ground English knights would have to charge across. He also had pits dug and planted them with sharpened stakes. He organized his men so that knights who got past the gizmos and the stakes charged their horses into a wall of pikes. 

This sounds harder on the horses, who didn’t choose to be there, than on the knights–although to be fair a knight on his way to the ground wasn’t in an enviable position. But when the alternative is letting the knights kill you, you know how it is: a person’s ruthless side can come to the surface. 

For our purposes, what matters is that knights charged foot soldiers and lost. 

The English had longbowmen and might have won if they’d used them first, but they sent in the knights, in their full heroic cluelessness, and lost the battle. 

Like the Scottish wall of pikes (and those sharp little gizmos, which would upset the balance of the sentence so let’s leave them out), the English longbow tipped battlefield power away from knights and toward ordinary soldiers. Longbowmen–commoners, remember, and beneath a knight’s notice–fought from a distance, in relative safety, and a wise commander let them decimate the enemy before turning the heroes on horses loose, even if doing so upset the social order.

By the end of the fifteenth century, armies had grown larger and knights no longer trained for a massed charge. Now it wasn’t just longbows and pikemen they’d be coming up against, but cannons. You couldn’t charge a cannonball and there was no heroism in getting splattered by one.

 

Regulating warfare

As the middle ages became middle aged and the structure of society changed, warfare needed a bit more justification. The papacy had become more powerful, so if one Christian king was going to fight another, he needed to justify it–if not to god at least to the Pope. That didn’t put an end to wars between Christian kings but it did boost everyone’s creativity by a factor of twelve.

But what really tamped things down was that war had become expensive, even with the countervailing lure of loot and ransoms. The side with more cannons and more soldiers was likely to win, and both cost money. 

Money? In the early middle ages, it was around but it wasn’t central. In the 1150s, if you’d spread England’s supply of money evenly, everyone would’ve had 6 pence. By 1320 it would’ve been 10 shillings. (Twelve pence to the shilling. You’re welcome, and I had to look it up.) The shift to a money economy was underway. By the time we reach the later medieval period, warfare was measured in money–for arms, for soldiers, for all those little incidentals you forget to factor in at your peril. All that meant taxes, and in England it meant the king going to that ever-annoying Parliament, which had the power to approve or not approve some new tax to finance a new war. 

That took some of the fun out of going to war.

And in the sixteenth century, after the War of the Roses went further and ruined the reputation of internecine warfare, Henry VII got rid of private armies by making it illegal for lords to keep supporters who wore their livery. 

Translation? Every lord had his colors and symbols and assorted rigamarole. They dressed their followers to match. Think of it all as a uniform. 

Building an army was now the prerogative of the king. Warfare had been nationalized.

 

Numbers

Wars in the early middle ages were likely to involve a few thousand men. Battle of Hastings, where the Normans took England? Seven thousand to eight thousand men on each side. Before 1300, most battles were much smaller. Sure, chroniclers wrote about armies of up to 80,000, but then I regularly claim to be a thousand years old. Don’t believe everything you read. Historians–those clever devils–look at the financial record to dig out more realistic numbers, and they say (or at least one says) it was rare to find more than 10,000 on a side. 

By the sixteenth century–and by this time the middle ages isn’t just middle aged, it’s bald and has bad knees, if it’s still the middle ages at all–the English army had 30,000 men (do you really care where?). The Spanish had 200,000 and the French 80,000. And you can tell from the numbers that these weren’t drawn from the top of society. The top layer wasn’t big enough and didn’t see any glory in getting killed by cannonballs anyway. The percentage of noblemen dying of violence went from 25% in 1400 to 2.5% in 1750. Kings no longer risked their lives leading their troops. They delegated. 

No two people agree on exactly when the middle ages ended, but for the sake of convenience let’s say it ends here.

The English castle: a quick history

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When the Normans conquered England, they didn’t just bring their language–basically French, but you can call it Norman French if it makes you happy–they also brought the castle.

Not physically. Castles are heavy and prone to sea sickness. They brought the idea of the castle, and they set about building them in strategic spots as a way to keep control of their newly conquered land. 

 

A rare relevant photo: Okehampton Castle, in Devon–or what’s left of it. In 1384, according to a nearby sign, it was owned by the Courtenays, who arrived with a household of 135 people: the family, of course, plus 61 servants, 41 esquires, 14 lawyers, 8 clergymen, and 3 damsels–young, unmarried women. I’m tempted to add six geese a-swimming and five gold rings but the sign doesn’t mention them so I won’t. When the family moved on, they left behind a small garrison, a gatekeeper, a constable, and a few men-at-arms.

 

The hell you say: didn’t the Anglo-Saxons have castles?

Nope. To defend the country from the Vikings, A couple of hundred years earlier, Alfred the Great–known in his own time as plain old King Alfred–had promoted the building of fortified towns, called burhs, and to attract settlers who’d defend them, he offered free plots of land inside the walls. I was about to write that it wasn’t a bad deal if you lived through an attack, but your chances of getting killed were probably just high if you were cutting hay. So, not a bad deal and I won’t add any qualifiers.

But burhs weren’t castles. They were closer to the fortified towns the Romans had built before they toddled off back to Rome (and the many other places they’d come from). In fact, some burhs used what was left of Roman fortifications as a starting point. 

One theory holds that the Normans conquered England relatively easily because the country lacked castles. As Orderic Vitalis (monk; chronicler; son of an Anglo-Saxon mother and a Norman father; born in 1075, not long after the conquest) explained, “The fortifications that the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies.”

 

So okay, castles were something new

The Normans built their first castles quickly, cheaply, and Ikea style. William the Conqueror–chief Norman and the new king–divided the land up among his newly be-lorded followers, and that land came well stocked with forests and dirt, which they used to assemble motte and bailey castles. 

Motte and what? A motte was a big mound of earth (and inevitably, yes, some stone) and a bailey was the ditch and bank surrounding it. At the top was a wooden tower. 

The problem with a wooden castle, though, was that if the Big Bad Anglo-Saxon Wolf came bearing a torch and followed by a bunch of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon wolflets, it would burn. What’s more, it would burn just as cheerily if instead of an Anglo-Saxon some invader set it alight. And if none of that happened, give it thirty or so years and the timbers would rot.

So William sent out a memo: rebuild the castles in stone.

More work, yes, but more durable, and as it happened Ikea had a kit for this too: the land held stone as well as wood and dirt. And lo, the lords followed the pictures on the instruction sheet and assembled more durable castles. Some kept the motte and bailey style; others went for a newer pattern that relied on massive stone walls to repel attackers. 

But we’re not going to talk about architecture. I get bored easily. Let’s talk about . . . 

 

. . . Why castles mattered

Have you ever wondered why an invading medieval army couldn’t just bypass the castles and rampage through the countryside while the lords and knights who were supposed to defend the land sat behind their walls eating, drinking, and acting lordly and knightly? Did the invading army really have to come to the door and challenge them to a fight?

As you may have figured out by now, military strategy isn’t one of my strengths, but here’s what I know: First, castles had a habit of getting themselves built where they could control a stretch of land: near roads, navigable rivers, ports, that sort of place. Helicopters hadn’t been invented, so the castles wouldn’t have been easy for an army to bypass. 

Second, an invading army stomping around anywhere near a castle would’ve set the lines of communication buzzing. Word moved more slowly than it does today, but move it did, and it would’ve reached the castle and been a cue for the lord to gather up as many fighters as he could and get out into the field. 

Third, if you were an invading army and the defending soldiers didn’t come out to meet you, you might have wanted to stop and dig them out while you knew where they were. Even if it did slow you down by a few weeks. Or in rarer cases, a few years. 

And fourth, it was how things were done. How many of us think to question that? 

But castles weren’t just forts. They were also administrative centers and homes to the lord, his family, his servants, his knights, and whatever other soldiers he had on hand–more in times of war; not so many in times of peace. 

You notice that bass note thumping away there? His, his, his, his. Especially in the early part of the medieval period, this was a heavily masculine world, and a militarized one. The whole point of the aristocracy was to fight, but that job belonged only to the species. 

Militarization was baked into the social structure: peasants toiled, priests and their churchly associates prayed, and lords fought. Warfare justified the aristocratic male’s existence and his dominance over the, ahem, lower orders. In Medieval Horizons, Ian Mortimer argues that not only were their lives centered around fighting, they–or many of them anyway–enjoyed the sheer brutality of it. 

 

Why castles stopped mattering as much

Cannons took a lot of the fun out of castles. It’s true that cannons were big and heavy and not easy to lug around the countryside, and it’s also true that Ikea didn’t stock them, so they couldn’t be assembled on site, but from around 1400 on, they could wreck a castle wall. So they were well worth dragging around. 

Forget waiting out a siege inside your thick stone walls. Warfare had changed.

 

Why were castles still used, then?

A castle was still good for what Ian Mortimer (Medieval Horizons; remember?) calls “regional control.” If you want to substitute “oppressing the peasantry,” be my guest. I wouldn’t sink to such a biased way of putting it but I can’t find an argument against you using it.

They also still served as residences, administrative centers (not unrelated to that oppressing business), and big honkin’ status symbols. The largest lords had multiple castles, and moved from one to the next, along with their households–lady, children, servants, hangers-on (secular and clerical)–taking their belongings with them, from beds to wall hangings to candlesticks and no doubt the candles as well. In times of peace, there would’ve been fewer soldiers and knights; in times of war, more. For an example, see the note under the photo. Breaking with all my traditions, the photo’s relevant to the post this week.

In the early century or three after the Norman invasion, traveling from castle to castle was about keeping that retinue fed. I can’t help thinking of them as a horde of locusts, needing to move on before they’d stripped the land clean. Move further into the middle ages, though, and that becomes less of an issue. One explanation I’ve seen is that the medieval warm period (800 – 1250 or 950 – 1250, depending on who  you ask) came along and more food was grown. Another is that  trade expanded. Between 1100 and 1300, more than 1,600 markets were established–something that can be traced because they needed permission. You can add a thousand fairs, so food could now follow the aristocrats and the aristocrats didn’t have to follow the food. And that’s as far as I can take that discussion. Sorry. I’m sure there’s more to be dug out.

As the castle’s military value decreased, the ratio of men to women evened out, and as the middle ages wore on, trekking from castle to castle became less of a thing. Lords tended to settle into a primary residence and make it more comfortable.

Murder & the law in medieval England

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Medieval England had only one punishment for murder: death. In fact, death was a kind of one-size-fits-not-all-but-a-lot punishment. It was just the right size for poaching, theft, heresy, and petty treason. 

Petty treason? That was when, say, a servant killed their master or mistress, a wife her husband, or a priest his superior. If you owed a person “faith and obedience,” killing them was (of course) treason.  

Big-league treason? The penalty for that was a much more painful death. Long-term imprisonment wasn’t a prominent item on the punishment menu. 

But I’ve derailed us. Let’s stick with murder. Death being the only possible penalty doesn’t give us the full picture; most murderers, or alleged murderers, were never convicted.

Very nearly semi-relevant photo: Foxglove. It can be poisonous, so if you’re looking to kill someone . . .

A note 

I’ll be leaning heavily on the wonderful Medieval Murder Maps here. It’s a treasure trove and not limited to information about murders. If you’re interested in the medieval period, go rummage around. It’ll be worth your time, I promise.

 

How common was murder? 

In the 1340s, Oxford had an estimated (emphasis on estimated) murder rate of around 110 per 100,000 people. In fourteenth-century London, that was between 36 and 52 per 100,000. In 2020 Britain, it was 1 per 100,000. 

A BBC article explains the high rates by saying that the king’s justice would’ve been seen as too slow, too corrupt, or too both to count on, so arguments easily escalated into fights, and sharp instruments were always close to hand. If no other weapon was handy–and everyday tools could be lethal–just about everyone carried a small knife to eat with, to work with, to defend themselves with, to look cool on the street with. If that’s not enough, the population that skewed heavily to the young and (presumably) hot-headed and the culture that placed a high value on honor, which is a fragile beast that wants constant defending.

Figure in also that wounds which wouldn’t be fatal today would’ve been then. 

 

Prosecution

So okay, let’s say you murdered someone. Oops. You were now officially in deep shit–unless of course you were rich and powerful, in which case the shit wouldn’t be anywhere near as deep.

You could be brought to trial in two different ways: in the first, a jury indicted you and the coroner ordered the sheriff to arrest you and keep you in jail until you could be tried. Or until you died of the miserable conditions in prison, whichever came first. 

The second way was if someone launched what was called an appeal–a sort of private effort to bring a person to justice. A relative of the crime’s victim could do this, or an accomplice who’d turned king’s or queen’s evidence. (Sorry, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either but it’s all I know about it.) 

An appeal could be launched against the main accused or against accessories. 

Women could only launch an appeal if they’d been raped or if their husbands had been killed.  

Yes, it was a lovely time to live. 

 

But . . .

. . . most people who were accused of murder weren’t put to death for it, so let’s talk about what happened to them.

One group we can peel away either fled or sought sanctuary and abjured the realm.

Fleeing is clear enough. You turned, you ran, you tried never to be seen in the neighborhood again. As far as the coroner was concerned (and I admit I’m guessing here), that made you somebody else’s problem. In an era before CCTV, before anyone carried identification, it might not have been hard to disappear, although it was probably hard to eat and put a roof over your head once you’d cut yourself loose from the social structure. But if you weren’t fussy about eating, or if you had ready cash and connections, you might manage. Still, I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems of disappearing if your flight took you through villages and hamlets where a stranger stood out like a fluorescent zebra. People did travel–what else were all those pilgrimages about?–but you’d hardly be invisible. 

Or you could forget all that, embrace your fluorescent zebrahood, and become an outlaw. 

So that’s fleeing. Seeking sanctuary and abjuring the realm, though, needs translation. By the fifteenth century, sanctuary held a recognized place in English common law, and it came in two flavors: taking time-limited sanctuary in a parish church (that was also called taking church) followed by abjuration of the realm and time-unlimited refuge in a chartered sanctuary.

If you took sanctuary in a parish church, you’d need to count the days. In most cases, you had forty before your claim of sanctuary ran out. After that you either surrendered or abjured–translation: renounced–the realm, which meant you confessed and gave up whatever protection the king’s peace offered, along with your rights as a citizen. Then you’d negotiate with the sheriff and coroner over what port you’d leave from and how long it would take you to get there. If you detoured off the highway, you could be killed, and once you got to the port you had to take the first available ship. 

Which assumed you could pay for your passage–or I guess convince a captain that you were worth hiring. 

Then you went into exile. Forever. Or until you were pardoned or came back without a pardon, hoping to be (a) forgiven or (b) not noticed. Or mistaken for a fluorescent zebra.

Chartered sanctuaries first came into being around 1400: a limited number of religious houses were granted the right to shelter felons from secular justice and debtors from the creditors who were trying to have them imprisoned. The felons, at least, had to confess their crimes, often in detail, and swear to keep the peace, follow the rules, and play nice. 

After that, they couldn’t set foot outside the chartered sanctuary’s precincts without risking arrest, and they had to find someplace to live within them–not to mention a way to support themselves, and since sanctuaries weren’t marketplaces or red-hot centers of business, ways to make money were scarce. So this was either for felons who could pay their way or for the ones who only planned on staying a few days and then disappearing into the night. 

By the time Henry VIII dissolved England’s monasteries, the number of people claiming sanctuary in either form had narrowed down to almost no one. Sorry, but I’m not sure why.

 

Prison

If you were accused of murder–or anything else while we’re at it–you’d have had good reason to flee: people died in medieval prisons while they were waiting to be tried. In Newgate Prison, the coroner recorded some prisoners as having died of starvation. Others died a ”rightful death and not of any felony.” That would’ve meant typhus (called jail fever), malaria, cold, or infected wounds.

To point out the screamingly obvious, if they died of neglect, starvation, and poor conditions, no one was at fault.   

If you’re inclined to think harsh punishment leads to less crime, do consider the middle ages.

Prisons were divided by class and by cash. The keepers could and did demand fees for admission (yes, seriously; otherwise no doubt that have been mobbed by people wanting to get in) and for release. They charged for food, bedding, and heating. In London, prisoners who could pay enough were kept on the Master’s side and the upper floors. Below them were the Common’s side, below ground level. The poorest prisoners (I’ll go out on a limb and guess those were the people who couldn’t pay for their admission) went into a common chamber. Anyone the keepers thought might escape was fettered.

 

Numbers

But we haven’t accounted for everyone who was accused of murder and not put to death, and to figure out what happened to the ones who didn’t flee or seek sanctuary, the makers of the Murder Maps combed through the “records of gaol delivery.” 

Gaol? That’s British for jail. And delivery? Starting in 1330, jails had to be “delivered,” which meant all the prisoners tried and the jail emptied, three (or possibly two; do you really care?) times a year. 

Of the people tried for murder, 90% to 95% were (a) acquitted, (b) transferred to an ecclesiastical prison, or (3) pardoned by the monarch, leaving 5 – 10% who were actually hanged. 

If you’re in that 5 – 10%, that’s not much comfort, but it does soften our image of the era.

 

Acquittals, priests and pardons

I couldn’t find any numbers that would let me take even a wild and irresponsible guess at how many people were acquitted. I’ve always assumed not many were, but that’s based on no information whatsoever. Don’t mistake it for a fact-related guess. 

Once we set that group aside, we’re left with two final groups to peel away; priests and people who were pardoned. 

If you were a priest, you could be convicted in the king’s court but only the church had the power to punish you, and the church didn’t have capital punishment, so you’d want to move your holy hind end into the church system. 

All well and good, but how was a court to decide, in the absence of centralized records, who was a priest and who was just pretending to be? Why, by asking them to do something priestlike: after 1351 (or from the 15th through 18th centuries, according to another source), anyone claiming benefit of clergy was asked to read psalm 51 in Latin.  If he could read it, he was a priest. Who else could read Latin, after all? It became known as the neck verse: it saved your neck. Some criminals were said to have memorized it, because you could never tell when it would come in handy. 

This only worked if you were male–at least until 1629, when it was extended to women, although women still couldn’t be priests. The only way to understand that is to accept that the law and religion follow a logic we mere mortals can’t always make sense of.

And according to one source, it worked only once: that first use earned you a brand on the thumb.   

Pardons came from the monarch, who had the power to pardon a person for any reason or for none. If you were wealthy enough, you could buy a one. If you were well connected (which pretty much implies wealthy, but let’s not quibble), you or your supporters could plead for one–say because you fought in one of the king’s wars. Or you could also be pardoned for agreeing to serve in a current one.

If you were pregnant, you could have your execution postponed, or sometimes reduced to a fine. Note: this did not work well if you were male. You’d have an easier time learning Latin.

Finally, you could give evidence against other people and if they were convicted you got to go into exile. That was called turning king’s approval. The bargain-basement option for people who couldn’t get pregnant and didn’t have the money or connections to wangle a pardon.

*

Unconnected to that: it’s deeply weird to be writing about medieval England while the US–my native country–sinks ever deeper into autocracy and (I don’t use the word lightly) fascism under the most bizarre leader elected in my (or anyone else’s) lifetime; as federal employees snatch immigrants and people who kind of look like they might be immigrants off the street and deport them to wherever without warrant or trial; as the people of Gaza starve; as–oh, hell, I could go on for pages but you know what’s happening out there. We all do. The world dances on the edge of disaster and those of us who can, go on leading our lives. Writing about this stuff is part of my life. 

Forgive me, though, if I take a moment to acknowledge what’s happening out in the real world. Because none of us can afford to look away, thinking our safety is guaranteed. We can’t afford to be silent. Our voices are small but we can’t know in advance what will make a difference. 

Be noisy, my friends. No effort is wasted.

In fear, in grief, in love,

Ellen

Murder, politics, and trashy gossip in medieval England

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. . . and of course religion. I should’ve squeezed religion into that headline. You couldn’t separate it from politics back then. It permeated everything.

The murder in question happened in 1337, in London, when a priest, John Forde, was killed on a busy street by a group of men who slit his throat and stabbed him in the stomach, and that’s the loose end of a tangled strand of yarn, so keep hold of it and let’s see if we can’t do some untangling.

Irrelevant photo: begonia

 

The coroner, the sheriff, and the jury

Right after the murder, the coroner and sheriff were called and they did what they were programmed to do: gather an investigative jury–usually 12 local men but that could go as high as 50. For this murder, they gathered 33, signaling that it was a high-profile case. 

Juries generally included witnesses, community members, and people who claimed to know something about what had happened. They all had to be men and of good social standing, and their first job was to figure out the cause of death: was it unnatural (slit throat? yeah, probably), and had a felony had been committed (a fair bet)? 

Juries also interviewed witnesses, examined the body, and considered suspects and motives. Combine that with juries being made up of people who knew something about the incident or thought (or claimed or were told) they did and you’re likely to find that the story a jury put together was colored by local gossip and the interests of local and professional communities. Predictably enough, jurors weren’t immune to pressure or political convenience. 

This particular jury identified a set of suspects and said there’d been a longstanding feud between Forde–that’s the priest, remember, who was now extremely dead–and the wealthy and aristocratic FitzPayne family. Sorry: make that wealthy, aristocratic, and powerful, so although a suspect’s possessions were supposed to be confiscated and held in safekeeping, this jury swore blind that they had no idea where to find these well-known, powerful people, and also that at least one of them had no belongings to confiscate.

According to the coroner’s report, “The jurors found that there had been a long-standing dispute between Ella, the wife of Sir Robert FitzPayn, and John Ford. Ella hence persuaded Hugh Lovell, her brother, Hugh Colne and John Strong, latterly her servants, Hascuph Neville, a chaplain, and John Tindale, to kill him. Accordingly, on the preceding Friday after Vespers, they waylaid John Ford as he walked up Cheapside, opposite the junction with Bread Street, and Hasculph.”

 

The background

Ella (or Ela; to promote inconsistency, I’ll spell it both ways) was married to Robert FitzPayne (or Payn; and Forde is sometimes Ford; listen, spelling was a liquid at the time and in the interest of making life difficult some of the spelling’s have been modernized some of the time)–

Where were we? Ella was married to Robert FitzPayne, and back in 1332 someone had denounced her to the archbishop of Canterbury for having sex with “knights and others, single and married, and even with clerics in holy orders.” 

Mind you, we have no way of knowing who she had sex with and whether. My default setting is to be skeptical about sexual accusations against women. It was–and to a lesser extent still is–a cheap and easy way to wreck a woman’s reputation, at a time when reputation (especially a woman’s) was all-important. And all it boils down to is horror at the idea of a woman having unsanctioned sex. 

The only man named as her lover in the accusation was the priest, John Forde.

By way of punishment, the church–which had the power to punish its members–banned her from wearing gold, pearls, or precious stones; she was also to donate some whopping sum of money to monastic orders (to be used, at least in theory, for the poor); and by way of public shaming, every autumn for seven years she was to walk the length of Salisbury Cathedral barefoot, carrying a four-pound candle to the altar.

To all of which she apparently said, “Oh, yeah, how you gonna make me?” because a second letter claimed she’d abandoned her husband and was hiding in Rothermere, and had been excommunicated. 

Forde, who hadn’t gone into hiding, doesn’t seem to have been punished. 

 

The background to the background

Ah, but it all goes back further than that, to 1322, when Ella, John, and Robert were indicted by a royal commission for conspiring with a gang of extortionists to raid a Benedictine priory. 

Robert? You remember him. Her husband. He was lord of the nearby castle, Stogursey. 

The lot of them smashed up the priory’s gates and buildings, felled trees, raided the quarry (stone, you may be aware, is heavy, which argues for a fair number of people being involved here), then drove 18 oxen, 30 pigs, and 200 sheep back to the castle and held them for ransom.

Do you get the sense that aristocrats thought of themselves as untouchable?

This was in the period leading up to the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the priory they raided was an outpost of a French abbey. If you wanted to attack a French-aligned abbey, this wasn’t a bad time to do it. 

Even so, what’s a priest doing in the middle of that? Well, his church was on the FitzPayne family’s estate and they could well have been its patrons, leaving him torn between the church, which had authority over him, and the FitzPaynes, who might have had a more immediate power. But that’s guesswork.

This all happened at a time when the archbishop was trying to police the morals of the aristocracy and gentry, and he might have read Forde’s involvement in the raid as signaling that his loyalty to the church was coming second to his more worldly loyalties. Exactly how that connects to the archbishop sentencing Ella to public humiliation ten years later is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to draw a line from one dot to the other and label it Retribution.

It’s also hard not to draw a line between Ella being denounced to the archbishop–presumably by Forde, since he went unpunished although he was the only lover named in the complaint–and Forde’s murder. Let’s label that line Retribution as well.

It might be good, though, to remember that a lot of guesswork went into those last paragraphs. 

The archbishop died in 1333, at which point he drops out of the story, and for four years everything went quiet, at least as far as we can tell from this distance in time. Then four years later, Ela (presumably) had Forde killed. 

Manuel Eisner, who (along with multiple other people) created a wonderful website called Medieval Murder Maps, speculates that she was taking revenge for the humiliation the archbishop imposed on her–or at least tried to impose. He cites the public nature of the killing, saying it was designed to remind people who was in control. 

“Where the rule of law is weak,” he said, “we see killings committed by the highest ranks in society, who will take power into their hands.”

 

And at the end of that strand of yarn?

Only one man was indicted for the murder, and predictably enough he was one of the servants–and even that was five years after the murder. As far as we can tell, everybody else went on with their lives.

It’s worth repeating that we have no idea whether Ela slept with any of the men she was accused of being involved with. She was denounced and the church handed her a penance. That’s all we know. Even before the invention of the printing press gave the world sleazy newspapers, a sex story about a woman was sure to sell copies.

And with that out of the way, go explore the website. It’s wonderful.

Serfdom, freedom, and misogyny in the Middle Ages

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Today’s excursion into English history takes us to a moment in the Middle Ages when misogyny, common law, and feudalism– Well, cars hadn’t been invented yet, so let’s say they had a cart crash. High speeds hadn’t been invented either, so they all came out intact if slightly battered.

We’ll start with the law part.

 

Common law

English common law dates back to the Middle Ages and if you’re a fan of convoluted systems I can’t recommend it highly enough. Basically, this is a system of law that’s based not on what I think of as law–you know, a set of written rules that you transgress at your peril–but on what courts have decided in the past. It can rely on a written law if it’s in the mood, but precedent is the driving force.   

The system gives judges a shitload of power in shaping the law, and I’m naive to think common law’s outside of my experience (although I still think it is), because the system’s in use today in an assortment of countries, including the US and UK, the two countries I’ve lived in. 

Shows you what I know.

A rare relevant photo: medieval rural life–somewhere.

 

Other systems of law in the Middle Ages

Just to confuse things, in the Middle Ages English common law coexisted with other legal systems. Church courts applied canon law, urban and rural courts applied local customary law, Chancery and maritime courts applied Roman law. 

The royal courts were for the most serious stuff and were run by a professional (in other words, paid) judge. Starting in the 13th century, those judges traveled to each county two or three times a year and held county assizes. 

County sheriffs held a court in each hundred. 

A hundred? It was an administrative/political division, smaller than a county but bigger than a pie. Starting in the 14th century, justices of the peace took the role over from the sheriffs. They were drawn from the local nobility and gentry, and they weren’t paid for the job but I’d bet a small pie that they got power and prestige from it. 

In towns, borough courts played a similar role.

After all that, we get to manor courts. These were run by the lord of the manor or the village. They dealt with petty crimes–debt, theft, fighting. The accused would more than likely have been the lord’s own villeins.

What’s a villein? That’s medieval-speak for a serf. Sort of, and it sounds nicer, though, doesn’t it? 

The sources I’ve found in a quick search contradict each other about what the difference is between a serf and a villein. One says villeins, like serfs, were tied to the land–not slaves but not free to leave either. Another says villeins were free to leave but generally couldn’t afford to. Both sources are more or less bite-size but the issue’s off to one side of the point I’m trying to make, so let’s use a word that dodges the whole issue: naif. 

If you consult Lord Google, he’ll inform you that it’s also spelled neif, but I’ll stick with the more familiar spelling. It’s the root of our word naive, and you can trace it back to Old French, where it meant “native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool.” Or to the Middle Ages, when it meant someone who was born a serf. 

But we were talking about courts. Church courts could try lay people for things like adultery, homosexuality, gambling, or not showing up at church–you know, the stuff that really mattered. Priests acted as the judges and unlike the other courts they had no juries.

If you’re  feeling hemmed in and starting to hyperventilate, I’d say you understand the situation fairly well. Most people probably got through their lives without appearing before any of those courts, but it can leave the modern reader feeling, um, judged. 

 

Common law and serfdom

With all the throat-clearing out of the way, let’s move closer to that collision I promised. A whole lot of legal time and energy gets devoted, both then and now, to disputes over property, and under feudalism the most valuable properties would’ve been land and the naifs who were trapped on it.

This brings us to the blog Legal History Miscellany, and to a post, “All Bastards Are Free.” Understand, please, that the author, Sara M. Butler, isn’t talking here about people she doesn’t like. She’s using the language of the era. Being born inside or outside of marriage mattered. She saw a passing reference to the bastard children of villeins being born free, wondered if that could possibly be true, and off she went down a fascinating rabbit hole. 

As it turns out, the answer to whether bastard children were born free is both yes and no, and that’s due to common law’s annoying habit of changing without having to file a written notice in triplicate. For information, Butler turned to legal treatises, which are as close as you can get to codified law at this stage. 

In the 12th and early 13th centuries, the child of an unmarried, unfree woman was a naif, even if the child’s father was free. 

What if the parents were married? Worrying over that seems to have kept a good number of lawyers occupied, and they went into intricate detail over it.The result? If both parents were unfree, the child was unfree, whether the parents were married or not. If the man was free and the woman not? The child was unfree. If the mother was free and the father wasn’t? Guess what! The child still wasn’t free. In fact, if that free man married the unfree woman, he lost his freedom.

Go a little further into the 13th century, though, and the rules loosen up a bit: the child follows the status of the mother, so if the mother is free, the child is free.

By the end of the 13th century, opinion was branching out in different directions, as it will when judges are essentially making the law. One treatise held that “One who is begotten of a free man but born of a bondwoman out of wedlock is a serf.” Another held that either parent could pass freedom down to their child. A third held that the father was the determining factor: the child of a free man married to a naif would be free; the child of an unfree man married to a free woman wouldn’t be. 

What happened, then, when the jurors didn’t know who the father was and therefore didn’t know if he was free, unfree, or fur-bearing? According to this line of argument, the child “belongs to the lord of the manor, for his condition is determined by that of his mother, by whomsoever he may be begotten, freeman or serf.”

One of those tracts holds that when “jurors do not in truth know whether [a person] is a villein or a free man, judgement must be in favour of freedom.” Another says that the “blood of a man” should not be tried “by means of women,” which means–

Okay, I’m not entirely sure what it means. It sounds like a woman’s status shouldn’t determine a man’s. I mean, come on, it was humiliating enough that a man had to be born of a woman, but why take it further than that?

What Butler says is, “I would argue that it is in these two statements, when taken together, that we see the glimmer of the origins of the common law rule that all bastards are free. Here’s the problem: the only person who can definitively prove that a bastard child’s father is free is the mother: she knows who she slept with and when. Granted, it surely comes as no surprise to anyone who studies the Middle Ages that by the late thirteenth century authorities were not keen to rely on a woman’s word alone, especially if it meant that a man might lose his freedom, or that an elite man would lose the profits associated with a villein and his entire line.

“Did justices decide to declare all bastards free because they didn’t want to have to rely on the word of a woman?” 

The implied answer is yes.

As one judge put it in 1279, “No woman should be received in proof except in a marriage case.“

 

Who actually went to court over this?

As long as all this child-bearing stayed on the manor, I doubt there would’ve been much cause to go to court over anyone’s status. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s nose was undoubtedly in everyone else’s business–and the lord of the manor was the judge anyway, with the locality’s wealthier citizens acting as jury, so the manor court wouldn’t be a smart place to sue for your or your child’s freedom. But if a naif hightailed it to a town, hoping to establish a new life as a free person, and a lord appeared to reclaim him or her, it was up to the lord to prove his right to the person by establishing that he or she came from a line of naifs. 

If the case Butler cites was typical, proving that was harder than it sounds. In 1280, William of Cressy tried to reclaim William son of Siward by producing a collection of (entirely male) relatives to prove that William S. came from a line of unfree men, but either William S. or his lawyer managed to undermine William C.’s claims about their status, one by one. 

Not only were the courts leaning against women, they seem to have been leaning more toward freedom than unfreedom. As one judge wrote, “Free law is more predisposed to save and maintain a man in his free estate than to condemn him or lead him into servitude and so, since you say that he is your villein and he says he is free, the law acts and we ought rather to act to save him and support him in his free estate than to maintain you in this to bring him back and reduce him to servitude, for it is clear that he is free until you have proved him the reverse by his blood.”

In another case, from 1326, Thomas son of Thomas the Elder tried to claim Richard Lachebere, using three unfree relatives as proof. Richard argued that they didn’t share the same blood because “he was a bastard and thus free.” The judge ruled that because Richard was a bastard, “he had estranged himself from every blood, so that he could not be proven a villein by any blood.” 

Or as Butler puts it, “Rather than rely on the word of a woman, it was simply easier to presume freedom.”

I do wonder, though, whether town courts were more inclined toward freedom since they sat outside the manorial system.