A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague

HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT MEDIEVAL PUBERTY?

We have a lot of written evidence about medieval adolescence, but some of our best information comes from the bones of dead teenagers. Most have been excavated from London cemeteries, but some were buried in other cities and a few in rural parishes too. The analysis of these bones is not easy: the skeletons must be complete or nearly complete; they must show clear indications of biological sex (sex is hard to determine in skeletons of the very young and very old); they must have good dental evidence; and only after these criteria are met, can osteoarchaeologists—that is, archaeologists who study bones—use them to estimate when puberty began for these individuals and how long thereafter they reached full physical maturity. These requirements can quickly make a big sample much smaller. One study started with 994 skeletons aged between ten and twenty-five years at death. Of these, 645 could be assigned estimated age at death, based on their teeth. Of these, only 470 could be assigned a sex (as seems to have been common in medieval cemeteries—we are not yet sure why—the sex ratio is skewed: 283 males and 187 females). And of this precious subset of individuals whose age and sex could be determined, pubertal stage could be assessed for only 152 males and 84 females.

In forensic crime dramas, medical examiners wring amazing—and amazingly clear—results from their work with dead bodies. This makes for great fiction, but reality is messier, especially when working with the skeletons of the long dead. Determining the sex of adolescent skeletons is so hard that even the best indicators (mostly based on the pelvis and the humerus) are only accurate about 80 percent of the time. Seeing an injury in a bone is not the same as understanding its cause—so that, for example, a broken rib could be a injury sustained by work, play, or even fighting. And the dead are not always a clear reflection of the living. Because of extensive migration into towns, for example, urban cemeteries contain skeletons whose diseases and injuries might tell more about rural hazards than urban ones. And the “osteological paradox” is perhaps the biggest worry of all—namely, that a person who dies quickly of a disease will show no evidence in their bones, whereas the skeleton of someone who suffered from the same disease and survived will carry telltale lesions. In the face of these challenges, osteoarchaeologists constantly develop ever-better techniques, and they offset possible error by relying on multiple indicators drawn from large samples.

Back to puberty. In the human species, puberty proceeds in three main stages. First, both girls and boys grow taller, very quickly, and this growth spurt is indicated skeletally by, among other measures, the early development of the wonderfully named “hamate hook,” a tiny bone in the palm of the hand. Second, just after the peak of this growth spurt (PHV or “peak height velocity”), girls begin to menstruate and boys’ voices change. This stage can also be tracked in the hamate hook, which reaches full development just a few months before PHV. Third, growth slows, puberty ends, and individuals reach full biological maturation. Since the hamate hook is by then fully formed, some of our best evidence comes from elsewhere in the hand—from the fusion of bones that make up the fingers (the phalangeal epiphyses).

Using the hamate hook, the presence of phalangeal epiphyses, and a variety of other measures, osteoarchaeologists have determined that most medieval skeletons indicate a growth spurt beginning around ten to twelve years of age; PHV was reached at about fifteen years; and full maturity by sixteen to nineteen years. Compared to modern teenagers, medieval adolescents began puberty at about the same time, but took longer to mature. Medieval girls began menstruating at about fifteen years, roughly two years later than modern girls, on average. Interestingly enough, Londoners—both females and males—seem to have matured especially slowly, perhaps because medieval cities had poor sanitation and many diseases.

Bones also tell us that medieval adolescents worked very hard: many individuals, for example, had lesions in their spines (called Schmorl’s nodes) that were caused by carrying heavy loads. Girls had more respiratory diseases and more injuries to their legs and backs; these suggest that they spent a lot of time indoors (near fires) and doing domestic work. Boys had more fractures, perhaps caused by outdoor labor, and more traumas to noses, teeth, and ribs, perhaps caused by fighting.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? See particularly the research of Mary Lewis: “Work and the Adolescent in Medieval England AD 900–1500: The Osteological Evidence,” Medieval Archaeology 60 (2016): 138–70; Paleopathology of Children: Identifications of Pathological Conditions in the Human Skeletal Remains of Non-Adults (2018); and with Fiona Shapland and Rebecca Watts, “On the Threshold of Adulthood: A New Approach to the Use of Maturation Indicators to Assess Puberty in Adolescents from Medieval England,” American Journal of Human Biology 28 (2016): 48–56.

During the Middle Ages, marriage united a man and a woman. The Christian Church had a few liturgies for uniting two men, but these created more a brotherhood than a marriage, and, to date, no such unions have been found for England. If Cecilia had cast her fate with marriage and a husband, her adult life would have developed differently, in terms of both household and kinship. Her sister Agnes provides a good contrast. When Agnes married Henry Kroyl in 1319, she moved from a household headed by her father into a household headed by her husband. In the first, she was a daughter; in the second, a wife; and in both, she was a dependent under the authority of a man. Agnes and Henry were married for thirty years or more, and they produced two children, John and Matilda, who lived to adulthood. They probably also kept servants in their household, at least occasionally. Agnes, in other words, more or less re-created the household of her childhood in the household of her marriage. Her position changed from daughter to wife and mother, but she spent her life in small, nuclear family households. Compared to Cecilia, Agnes’ domestic circumstances were much more stable and continuous.

As a married woman, Agnes also differed from Cecilia in her use of kinship. For Cecilia, her brothers William and Robert were important; for Agnes, these brothers seem to have mattered little. When Agnes went to court, the men on whom she most relied were her husband and two of his closest associates, his brother John Kroyl and his friend William Werketon. It was as if Agnes, having married, redirected her attention away from the Penifaders and toward the Kroyls. To be sure, she certainly visited with Cecilia and chatted with her brothers when she met them in the street, but when she needed help in court, she turned to Kroyls, not Penifaders. Interestingly, Agnes’ husband Henry made an equivalent transition. Before marriage, he relied often on his father, but after marriage, he became much more independent of paternal influence. In different ways, Agnes and Henry achieved similar ends: at marriage, they turned away from their parents. Their actions underscore how marriage created not just a new household but also, and this is important, a household separate from the parents of the new couple.

In any case, the decision to marry was not theirs alone. The death of Agnes’ father in 1318 seems to have precipitated the marriage, and a substantial land settlement by Henry’s parents in 1319 made it feasible. As everyone agreed in the Middle Ages, a good marriage needed much more than the loving consent of bride and groom. First, it needed to be economically viable—the bride and groom needed to have land, a house, and sufficient goods to set up on their own (see Figure 17). Parents almost always helped out. Henry’s parents arranged for the newlyweds to inherit from them a standard 15-acre landholding, and they likely also financed the purchase of a small property (a house, a farmyard, and six rods of arable land) that was given to Agnes as her dower. Agnes’ widowed mother Alice Penifader likely reciprocated by giving the new couple cash and other goods (some of her neighbors, we know from another case, gave their marrying daughter an unspecified amount of cash, a cow worth 10 shillings, and clothing worth more than 13 shillings). Second, a good marriage required the acquiescence of friends and neighbors. Friends helped to arrange the Penifader-Kroyl match (Henry’s friend William Werketon, for example, stood pledge for him when the Kroyls settled land on the new couple), and friends celebrated with feasting in the aftermath of the church wedding. One such feast in Brigstock cost 20 shillings, more than a year’s wages for a male laborer! Third, everyone also agreed that a good marriage required the approval of the Church; in every parish, the parson was expected to publicize the intended marriage to ensure that no impediments stood in the way and, then, to bless the marriage before the altar. So, although the consent of Agnes and Henry was a legally necessary part of their marriage, its full success also required the involvement of parents, the approval of friends, and the cooperation of priests. Moreover, had the Penifaders and Kroyls been ordinary serfs instead of privileged tenants of a royal manor, a fourth sort of consent would have been needed—that of their manorial lord or lady.