Medieval Peasants, Modern People
11 June 1344, Brigstock Court: Cecilia Penifader died in late May or early June, 1344, and her kin soon gathered in court to argue about her inheritance. Her sister Christina, wife of Richard Power, came from Cranford to claim the inheritance. Her nephew Martin, son of Henry Penifader, asserted a counterclaim. After a jury found that Christina was the nearer kin of Cecilia, she and her husband took possession of the inheritance, and they promptly transferred half of it to Martin. Then a second dispute arose. John, son of William Penifader (Cecilia’s nephew), Robert Malin (relation unknown), and Matilda, daughter of Henry Kroyl (her niece), claimed that before Cecilia died, she had leased her lands to them for a term of twentyfour years. Christina and Martin opposed this claim, arguing that Cecilia was mentally incompetent when she made this gift. A second jury was convened, and it determined that although Cecilia had competently arranged the lease, she had never left her house afterward and therefore the lease was invalid.
When Cecilia Penifader was in her mid-forties, she fell sick. For almost a year and a half, she lingered, with her sister, brother-in-law, nephews, and nieces wondering who would be able to claim her many acres of meadow and arable. After her death, the matter came before the Brigstock court. When the court clerk recorded the proceedings that declared Cecilia’s lease invalid and designated Christina as the heir of her dead sister’s lands, he also idly doodled the figure of a woman in the margins of his court roll (Figure 26). As if dissatisfied with his first effort (which produced a woman with two noses), he then redrew the head farther down the margin. Clerks often drew arrows, pointing hands, or other stock images to direct a reader’s attention to a particular entry, but they rarely doodled. Perhaps the arguments among Cecilia’s kin were so long and protracted that the poor clerk sketched to relieve his boredom. Certainly, he did not draw for love of his skill, for his sketches are rough and crude. Who was the subject of the clerk’s drawing on that day in June 1344? Cecilia? Christina? Anywoman? We cannot know, but the possibility that the woman represents Cecilia is intriguing. The clerk would have known Cecilia from her many years of attending court; she was the central figure in the disputes that he recorded in the text adjacent to the doodle; and indeed, he began his sketch immediately next to the line where he began writing, “Cecilia sister of Robert Penifader has died.” If Cecilia is the woman shown in this drawing, we can surmise that she was tall, thin, curly-haired, and possibly the bearer of a prominent nose. If so, this clerk’s doodle provides yet another extraordinary piece of evidence about this ordinary woman. Cecilia was just a peasant, but the Brigstock court rolls have revealed a great deal about her family, her life, and now, perhaps even her appearance.
Figure 26. Cecilia? The doodle in the left margin sits next to the entry that records Cecilia’s death. If the clerk used Cecilia as his inspiration, he created what is today the earliest surviving portrait of a medieval peasant. Notice the cross and pointing hand (or manicule) further down the left margin; these marked noteworthy entries. Also, if you look at the text to the immediate right of the doodle’s head, you might be able to make out: Cecilia soror Roberti Penifader. The handwriting is abbreviated but closely related to ours today. (Northamptonshire Records Office, box X365, roll 51.)
Cecilia’s story is exceptional for its documentation, but it must be interpreted with care. To begin with, Cecilia was just one of the millions of peasants who lived in the Middle Ages, and Brigstock was just one of the thousands of villages found in medieval Europe. Not all peasants were like Cecilia, nor were all villages like Brigstock in the early fourteenth century. Moreover, although we can today approach her life with an intimacy that almost seems to close a gap of seven hundred years, the links between Cecilia’s past and our present are not so straightforward. Therefore, we can best put closure on Cecilia Penifader’s life by considering how to understand her within the context of medieval history and also within the context of our own time.
Cecilia Penifader in the Middle Ages
Brigstock, Cecilia’s home for more than forty years, was an ordinary sort of medieval community. Tight clusters of buildings formed the nucleated villages of Brigstock and Stanion; open fields surrounded these houses and farmyards; the products of forest, stream, pasture, meadow, and farmyards supplemented the crops harvested each autumn from the fields; and markets lay within easy reach on any day except Sunday. Yet many other sorts of rural communities dotted the landscape of England and Europe in the Middle Ages. In settlements made on rougher terrain with less fertile soil, peasants organized themselves into smaller hamlets or even isolated farmsteads, and they relied much more on pastoral farming, viticulture, or mining than did the peasants of Brigstock. In villages located near cities, peasants accommodated to urban customers by producing vegetables, grains, or fruits to sell in city markets. In communities near the sea, peasants combined their rural labor with fishing, smuggling, and shipping. All of these variations can be seen within the various regions of Europe; in England, for example, there were shepherds in Yorkshire, tin-miners in Cornwall, market-gardeners in Essex, and fishers on the Devon coast.
Broader patterns of European settlement, climate, soil, and trade divided medieval Europe into three general regions. Brigstock lay in the area of classic manorialism, an area that stretched across much of northwestern Europe. To the south, in regions that abutted the Mediterranean, open fields were less common, sharecropping arrangements were often important, and vineyards competed for space with fields of grain. To the east, especially in lands beyond the Elbe that were colonized after 1000, peasants enjoyed cheaper rents and more autonomy than their counterparts to the west, and cultivation of grain predominated over breeding of livestock. In short, both within Europe and within its various regions, the medieval countryside was marked by diversity of settlement, social structure, and agrarian practice.
The passage of time brought further diversity. The half-century that encompassed Cecilia’s life was a transitional period in medieval history; so much so that some historians place it in the High Middle Ages (thus, c. 1000–1350) and others place it within the Later Middle Ages (thus, c. 1300–1500). Their disagreement raises important questions. Should we understand the transformation of medieval civilization as precipitated by the external force of disease, as brought by the Black Death in 1347–1349? Or should we consider that the change was internal to Europe, generated by a waning of growth and vitality that began a full fifty years before plague swept through Europe?
For many peasants, the early fourteenth century was certainly a difficult time of overpopulation, low wages, high rents, and the first widespread famine for many centuries. For many landowners, clerics, and merchants, the early fourteenth century was also a troubled era—a time of war between England and France, papal disgrace and relocation to Avignon, monetary crisis, and waning trade. Whether this half-century was the end of one medieval era or the beginning of another, it was certainly a period of trial, uncertainty, and change. As a result, Cecilia’s life would have been different if she had been born a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later. In 1315, Cecilia saw people sicken from hunger during the first year of the Great Famine; in 1215, she would have enjoyed a much greater abundance of food and land; and in 1415, she would have feared plague more than famine.
As times changed, so too did distinctions among the regions of Europe. In Cecilia’s day, there were many serfs in Western Europe and few to the east; a hundred years later, as serfdom was declining in the west, it was being successfully imposed on the formerly free peasants of Eastern Europe. These differences of place and time distinguish Cecilia’s life as a peasant from the lives of other peasants known to historians: for example, Ermentrude, wife of the peasant Bodo, who lived on an estate outside Paris at the beginning of the ninth century; Mengarde Clergue, the matriarch of a family that dominated the village of Montaillou in southern France at about the time of Cecilia’s birth; or Bertrande de Rols who married Martin Guerre in a village not far from Montaillou some two hundred years after Cecilia died. Because of the place and time in which she lived, Cecilia was freer of seignorial control than Ermentrude, less tempted by heresy than Mengarde, and not as secure in her landholding as was Bertrande.
Throughout the Middle Ages, peasants planted crops, raised sheep, tended vines, and fished streams; throughout the Middle Ages, they worked in social systems, mostly households and communities, that divided their work by age, gender, status, and ability; and throughout the Middle Ages, they owed some of the profit from their work to the Church, some to the manor, and usually some also to a king. These things were common to medieval peasants, but aside from these, the circumstances of their lives could and did vary widely.
What about Cecilia as a woman, though a woman of peasant status? What might she have shared with other medieval women, particularly those who lived in the towns, manor houses, and castles of early fourteenth-century England? To a surprising extent, gender rules ran across the status lines of medieval England. All women were proscribed from formal political office: countrywomen never worked as reeves, townswomen never served as mayors, and feudal women never sat in parliament. All women also faced similar legal disabilities: inheritance customs preferred sons over daughters whether the property was acreage, shops, or manors; and courts, whether manorial, mayoral, or royal, treated wives as dependents under the legal authority of their husbands. All women also knew that their public opportunities could wax, wane, and wax again over the life cycle. They might know some independence as adolescent daughters or adult singlewomen; they could expect to be “wholly within the power” of husbands if married; and they might face the possibility of considerable autonomy as widows. Finally, to some extent, most women did similar work: they bore and reared children; they served as helpmates to their husbands, whether at the plow, in the shop, or on the estate; they prepared food and repaired clothes. Although a knight could not plow and a plowman could not fight on horseback, their wives spun wool into yarn with equal ease (Figure 27).
Figure 27. Spinning on a Great Wheel. This lady (notice her fine dress and the purse hanging from her waist) is spinning on a great wheel, which she rotates with one hand while twisting yarn with the other. Women of all classes spun yarn, but peasant women used distaffs and spindles (as in Figure 19 on p. 123). Spinning wheels were a new technology in Cecilia’s lifetime, and were too expensive and bulky for peasant households. (British Library, Luttrell Psalter, folio 193.)
These similarities among medieval women are striking and important, for they suggest that gender rules were strong enough to cut across sharp distinctions of rank and status. Yet these similarities must not obscure the real differences that wealth and status created for medieval women. Cecilia lived in better housing and ate better food than many of her poorer neighbors, but the English aristocrat Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare, enjoyed a standard of living unimaginable to Cecilia. More importantly, although Cecilia might have punished a wayward servant and offered work to her poorer neighbors, Elizabeth de Burgh exercised an authority over lesser folk—male as well as female—that forever eluded Cecilia. Today, people often talk about how gender is shaped by class, race, and sexuality; for the Middle Ages, it is clear that gender was shaped by birth, legal status, wealth, and, as we have seen so clearly for Brigstock, household status.
In the early fifteenth century, Christine de Pisan, writing from the comforts of the French court, recognized the poverty of peasant women but idealized their status: “Although they be fed with coarse bread, milk, lard, pottage, and water, and although they have cares and labors enough, yet their life is surer—yes, they have greater sufficiency—than some that be of high estate.” Christine de Pisan imagined that the arduous lives of peasant women brought them a sort of rugged security lost to aristocratic women. This was an idyllic fantasy, facilitated by de Pisan’s own distance from the hard lives of those who actually lived in the cottages of the medieval countryside. Peasant women faced many difficult circumstances, and they did not enjoy any rough and ready equality with their fathers, brothers, and husbands. William Langland, the fourteenth-century English poet who lived in more humble circumstances than Christine de Pisan, offered a much more accurate judgment. In Piers Plowman, he wrote of the hunger, the cold, and the work of peasant women, and he concluded: “Pitiable it is to read or to show in rhyme the woe of those women who live in cottages!”
Cecilia Penifader in Our Time
Interpretation is an essential part of history. Historians spend a lot of time in archives and museums reading old documents, looking at tattered drawings, holding ancient tools and worn-out shoes. From these sorts of materials, historians are able to verify old facts and uncover new ones, and, in this capacity, we undertake important and satisfying work. But facts alone do not make history. A fact by itself often means very little. For example, what does it matter that Richard Everard complained in the Brigstock court of August 1316 that Robert Penifader and his daughter Cecilia had taken hay from his land? This is a minor fact about a petty quarrel between unimportant people, and it is a fact that is unlikely to appear in any textbook survey of English history or medieval history anytime in the near future. But once interpreted, this fact can reveal interesting things about how ordinary people lived during the Middle Ages—about the tensions that arose from the easily moved boundary markers in the open fields; about the ways in which petty theft and suspicions between neighbors increased during the Great Famine; even about how fathers were deemed responsible for the actions of their adolescent children.
Historians interpret at many levels and in many ways. At the microlevel, we ask about the significance of particular facts, such as Richard Everard’s complaint against the Penifaders in 1316. At a broader level, we seek to understand past customs and past societies, such as the ways in which medieval peasants sought to manage the lands around their villages. At the most expansive level, historians seek to relate the past to the present. In doing this, three approaches are most common: understanding the past as an antecedent to the present; using it as a tool for understanding human society in general; and examining it as a way to see the present more clearly. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, and each is useful. Weighing changes and continuities, each tries to understand the past not only on its own terms but also in the context of the present. As a result, each can suggest, in the case of Cecilia Penifader, how modern people might better understand the medieval past.
In many respects, Cecilia’s world seems radically different from our own. It was, to begin with, more circumscribed. Brigstock manor was large by medieval standards, but small by modern ones; Cecilia spent her life on a manor whose boundaries she could easily walk in one day and among several hundred people whom she knew very well. Although other people came and went all the time, Cecilia might have never traveled more than a few dozen miles from Brigstock. Cecilia’s world was also much poorer than our lives today. Cecilia’s house was one of the best then found in Brigstock, but it was roughly made and furnished with a few simple goods. It had no glazed windows, no chimney, no plumbing. Her diet was healthy and sufficient, but simple and dull. Her clothes were made of rough cloth and simply cut. She also lived within hierarchies that are less accepted today. In early fourteenth-century Brigstock, wives were expected to defer to husbands; peasants to their “social betters”; young to old; poor to better-off. As priests and friars had taught Cecilia, the hierarchy of three orders was God-given and good; some people had more important roles than others, but all people had duties that they should fulfill as best they could. This was, of course, an ideal that everyone did not accept all the time, but for Cecilia the modern notion that all people “are created equal” would have sounded peculiar.
Yet there are startling similarities between Brigstock today and Brigstock in the time of Cecilia Penifader. She was, like most people in Brigstock today, raised within the traditions of Christianity; she grew up, as many people do today, in a nuclear family household; she earned, like many women in modern Brigstock, lower wages than those paid to men; she paid taxes to her central government, as people do today; and although she was not a modern consumer in any sense of the term, she bought many of the goods she required. Cecilia was different from modern people in many ways, but similar in others.
Some historians will interpret Cecilia’s story as a precursor to the modern day, a fourteenth-century hint of things that will only be fulfilled in the twentyfirst century. In this view, the past becomes the direct ancestor of the present, with a clear and untroubled link between the two. This interpretive approach has appealed to so many historians that it has a long history of its own. In terms of medieval peasants, Alan Macfarlane has been its most ardent proponent. In The Origins of English Individualism (1978), Macfarlane suggested that the roots of English individualism and capitalism rest with peasants like Cecilia and villages like Brigstock. Indeed, he would argue that Cecilia was so free of familial constraints and so reliant on markets that she was not really a “peasant” at all. Macfarlane’s thesis illustrates how historical interpretation can go awry; his argument is so driven by modern questions (what are the origins of individualism? where did capitalism come from?) that it misunderstands the past. To be sure, Cecilia certainly did rely on markets where she sought to buy some goods and sell others; she also came from a family that readily sold and traded land, without much regard to traditions of familial ownership; and she was able to pick and choose among her kin, favoring some at the expense of others. But Cecilia and other English peasants were not modern before their time. After all, she was a villein of the ancient demesne, subject to the jurisdiction of her manor; she passed her life firmly rooted in the land and the work of her own hands; her social world was profoundly and somewhat narrowly shaped by kinship, community, household, and parish. Cecilia was a well-off peasant who cagily managed her resources, but she was still a peasant, neither a rugged individualist nor an early entrepreneur.
WHAT CAN WE KNOW FROM LITERATURE AND ART?
Documentary sources—court rolls and other official written reports about people, land, and manors—have been at the heart of this retelling of the lives of Cecilia Penifader and her neighbors. Documents and history go together comfortably, for documents offer seemingly straightforward information about past times (telling us that, for example, in 1319 Alan Koyk transferred a house to his son Richard who then transferred it to William Penifader, as described at the beginning of Chapter 6). But straightforwardness is not necessarily truth, and even documents have to be interpreted. Historians are taught that before we use a document, we must understand the document (who wrote it? what is the basic story line?), master its context (what conventions, and assumptions shaped the document? why was it written?), and assess its usefulness for history (is the source reliable and if so, about what?). In the case of the Koyk-Penifader transaction, we need to understand how manorial courts handled land transfers (that they were “transfers,” seldom “sales”); we need to know why Alan’s son Richard was involved (to prevent him from later complaining that his inheritance had been sold); and we learn a very useful fact from the property’s description (that after this transfer, William’s new house shared a wall with his sister Cecilia’s house).
Literary texts and artistic works present different challenges. Just like documents, texts and images require the historian’s skills of close study, context, and assessment, but they raise additional issues about artistic genius (was Geoffrey Chaucer so brilliant that his work is timeless?) and artistic traditions (did Chaucer take so much inspiration from past authors that any story he told is also out of time?). Consider, for example, Chaucer’s description of a plowman in his Canterbury Tales, given here as translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill:
There was a plowman with him [the parson] there, his brother;
Many a load of dung one time or other
He must have carted through the morning dew.
He was an honest worker, good and true,
Living in peace and perfect charity,
And, as the gospel bade him, so did he,
Loving God best with all his heart and mind
And then his neighbor as himself, repined
At no misfortune, slacked for no content,
For steadily about his work he went
To thrash his corn, to dig or to manure
Or make a ditch: and he would help the poor
For love of Christ and never take a penny
If he could help it, and, as prompt as any,
He paid his tithes in full when they were due
On what he owned, and on his earnings too.
He wore a tabard smock and rode a mare.
I’m not sure Cecilia would have recognized this “worker, good and true” living in “perfect charity.” In her world, peasants quarreled, sulked, cheated, and sometimes beat each other up; they did boon-works for the manor grudgingly; they exiled women and bastard children who might need their charity; they avoided what tithes and taxes they could. Chaucer has drawn on contemporary peasant life to create his plowman (hard work, poverty, charity, tithes), but he has mostly played with an old literary conceit that peasants are simple, pious, and closer to godliness. (He could have chosen to play with an opposite literary tradition—that is, that peasants are hopelessly ignorant and bestial.) Chaucer’s plowman is not simple in historical terms, and he is not simple in literary terms either. He is, in fact, part of a crowd of plowmen created by English authors around Chaucer’s time—of these, William Langland’s Piers Plowman is the most famous. We cannot understand Chaucer’s plowman without studying these other fictional plowmen too.
Because it has provided almost every medieval image used in this book, the Luttrell Psalter is an especially good example of the challenges of using creative work for historical purposes. Art historians debate many things about this psalter: when it was made (1320s–1340s), why it was made (for private use by the Luttrell family or for public readings by priests during services), how it was made (five artists or possibly more), and who told the artists what to draw (Sir Geoffrey Luttrell or his chaplain). For our purposes, some of these debates do not matter—whether made in 1320 or 1340, for example, the psalter is contemporary with Cecilia’s life and appropriate for our use here.
But the Luttrell Psalter is highly selective about what it does and does not show of peasant life. It mostly shows peasants as a lord like Sir Geoffrey would have seen them—at work in fields and pastures and at play during festivals. We do not see peasant houses or farmyards, and we do not see peasants in family groups or inside their homes. With a few enigmatic exceptions (see Figures 1 on p. 5 and 8 on p. 56) we see peasants who are serious and well-behaved members of “Those Who Work.” Most worrying of all for those who, like me, prize these rare depictions of peasants, the Luttrell artists dressed peasants misleadingly—their clothes are exceptionally well-made and dyed in colors that few rustics could afford.
Art historians can help us navigate these challenges because they are experts in visual cultures and signs. But they also work on interpretive levels of their own. For example, the reaping scene (Figure 22 on p. 148) in the psalter has been interpreted by Michelle Brown as symbolizing procreation: the two female reapers “raise their buttocks provocatively”; the man behind with a “curious corn-dolly resembling a phallus”; the woman in the background stretching in a way that evokes the labors of pregnancy and childbirth. I prefer to see Figure 22 as a realistic reaping scene—the reapers bent as necessary for wielding sickles; the man bundling the grain into sheaves; and the tired woman part of a team of harvesters who, as we know was common, swapped reaping and resting. My interpretation is different from Brown’s but not necessarily better, and of course, both her interpretation and mine can easily coexist.
So, how should historians—and students of history—approach literature and art? Very carefully. Documents, the bread and butter source of historical research, are certainly not mirrors of reality, but their usual purpose is to report on reality. Literature and art are usually not intended to be mirrors of reality—they are, instead, driven largely by creative concerns. History would be poorer if we ignored these aesthetic sources, but historians must be very deliberate in using them, and we have to listen to what scholars in other disciplines have to say. Working with all these cautions, historians can and should use literature and art in our own, historical ways.
Or, to put this another way, a picture is often worth a thousand words, but it also can sometimes require (as here) a thousand words of explanation.
TO READ MORE, start with Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (1996). For a full reproduction of the Luttrell Psalter, see Michelle P. Brown, ed., The Luttrell Psalter, A Facsimile (2006), where you can read her interpretation of the reaping scene on pages 13–14.
It is a fool’s errand to try to trace a straight line connecting us back to the fourteenth-century English countryside. First, there have been too many bumps, detours, and changes on the road between Cecilia’s world and our own. For example, in the time since Cecilia contributed to the royal taxes of her day, taxation has gone in and out of fashion, its modes of assessment have changed repeatedly (sometimes goods have been taxed, sometimes income, sometimes purchases), and the weight of its burden on ordinary people has gone up and down, again and again. Cecilia paid taxes in the early fourteenth century, and people pay taxes today, but that does not mean that the taxes she paid were a small egg from which has now hatched the huge tax-collecting bureaucracies of our day. Second, no modern society descends in pristine purity from Cecilia’s world. All European societies today derive in part from the traditions of medieval Europe, but they are built from many other traditions as well. There are no Penifaders in Brigstock today, but if there were, these modern Penifaders would be living in ways shaped by the many histories of people who have lived and died far from Brigstock’s borders. When the people of Brigstock today talk with neighbors, dress for work, check their social media, sit down to supper, play video games, and otherwise go about their daily lives, they are part of a broader world economy, world society, and world history. Thanks particularly to modern technologies of transportation and communication, as well as the interchange promoted by the United Kingdom, the now-defunct British Empire, and Europeanism, life in Brigstock today is immeasurably enriched by the traditions, histories, and customs of many people from many lands. In other words, there are many histories—not a single one going back to Cecilia and her time—that make up the world of Brigstock today, the world of Europe today, and the “Western” world today of regions that were once settled by Europeans.
Other historians have interpreted the past not as a direct antecedent of the present but instead as a laboratory that can reveal truths about the human condition. This was the intent of George Homans in his 1941 study English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. His final chapter considered how the history of medieval peasants could illuminate “the elements which societies of different kinds have in common,” and, to Homans’ mind, his study demonstrated three essential components of any social system (he called these: interaction, sentiment, and function). Today, historians are less willing to generalize so broadly, for we realize that generalization, while useful, can obscure variation and overlook historical context. Yet generalization is still a useful product of history, especially when carefully and hypothetically framed. For example, if women in Brigstock tried to limit their pregnancies with plants and herbs, then it is interesting to consider the possibility that birth control might be used by women of all places and times. The forms might have been cruder and less effective in the past, but perhaps women have always tried to limit their fertility by whatever means they had to hand. For another example, if people in medieval Brigstock lived, like the people of Brigstock today, in a society fractured by differences between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, then it is useful to wonder if such rankings might be an inevitable part of human life—or, alternatively, how one might break such a persistent trend. Cecilia’s hierarchies were based primarily on status, wealth, and gender, whereas those today draw on the somewhat different categories of class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and world region. But we share with her the fact of hierarchy, of ranking some people above others. For a final example, since people in Brigstock paid heavy taxes to their king, then perhaps people can always, as the saying goes, trust in two things: death and taxes.
These sorts of parallels between Cecilia’s time and our own are striking, and the temptation to draw general conclusions from them is strong. But when generalizing, it is best to seek hypotheses, not conclusions. To begin with, generalizations almost always break down under the weight of numerous exceptions. After all, people in some societies, past as well as present, have not used birth control, have not lived within socioeconomic hierarchies, and have not paid taxes. Moreover, any valid generalizations must be carefully and thoroughly qualified. As we have seen, for example, it is startling that female wageearners in Cecilia’s day earned about the same proportion of a male wage (two-thirds) as do many women today. Even more startling is that this differential seems to have been roughly maintained for hundreds of years, not only in Europe but also in world regions settled by Europeans. Yet this generalization is not an invariable truth. In some circumstances, the wage gap has narrowed a bit or expanded a bit, and these changes, however small and temporary, are certainly significant. Also, in different times and places, wages have mattered more (or less) in how people earn their livings. A valid generalization can be striking and significant, but it must always be understood within the changing and different contexts of societies, past or present.
If some historians interpret the past as precursor and others use the past as a social science laboratory, still other historians see the past as a sort of foreign country. This interpretation is typified by the approach of Henry Stanley Bennett (no relation to me) in his 1937 study, Life on the English Manor. Bennett began with a prologue nostalgically titled “A Faire Felde Ful of Folke,” evoking a countryside seen from a hilltop, a land and people that looked to him both different and familiar. From his distant perch, Bennett sometimes behaved like a stereotypical tourist. At times, he saw medieval peasants as simple folk with odd customs, and at times, he saw their world as impossibly idyllic, full of harmony and free of conflict. Bennett’s particular perspective would not be adopted by many historians today, for it is too driven by nostalgia and too liable to create an exotic and idealized past. But his general approach is still much used, for it offers the critical gift of broader perspective. For modern people, travel is one popular way to gain perspective. By visiting new places and meeting new people, we learn to see ourselves on a broader canvas than before. If we are lucky, we return home from our travels with a better appreciation of who we are. In a curious twist, therefore, when we travel, we learn, by appreciating others, to appreciate ourselves as well. History is travel of a different sort, travel in time. It can offer similar rewards.
The perspectival interpretation encourages us to understand ourselves through understanding people who have lived before us. For example, it is interesting to think about our own ideas of family in light of what familie (the Middle English term) meant to Cecilia. Kin were important to her, but so too were household members, and for most of her life, she lived in households that included non-kin as well as kin. Moreover, households in Brigstock took on some activities that families rarely do today. Like us, Cecilia looked for love and emotional support in her household, but she also saw her household as an economic unit of collective production and consumption. To her, familie meant household, and the composition of her household was fluid and changeable. “Family values,” if she could have understood the term, would have meant taking care of the people with whom she lived, whether they were kin, servants, or friends.
Cecilia’s experience of community also provides a caution against waxing nostalgic about past communities that were, we often imagine, more unified than our own. Cecilia lived in a small community in which everyone practiced the same religion, spoke the same language, ate the same foods, and followed the same customs. Nevertheless, Cecilia’s community still fell short of idyllic harmony: poor peasants resented their well-off neighbors; newcomers and strangers constantly passed through; and somebody in Brigstock was always guilty of ignoring neighbors’ fences, overstocking common pastures, or taking a bit of grain not their own. Perhaps community is never complete, always fractured, and always under repair. Or consider how Cecilia was taught that the three orders of her society were divinely ordained, as was the governance of women by men. Indeed, the medieval Church taught that husbands, in order to discipline their wives, could legitimately beat them. If Cecilia ever questioned these hierarchies of status and gender (and there is no indication that she did), she had to deal with compelling teachings that they were God-given and inevitable. But we do not see things the same way today. To us, the lesson of the three orders looks like a handy justification for the power of the landed elite and wifebeating looks like spousal abuse. What seemed God-given to Cecilia, looks human-made and human-justified today. Or, to put it another way, what looked natural to Cecilia Penifader, looks unnatural to us. How will things that seem natural to us look in a hundred years?
* * *
In undertaking this book, I hoped that modern people, through reading about Cecilia’s story, might better understand the ordinary lives of medieval peasants—their families, work, communities, beliefs, fears, and hopes. I knew a great deal about the Penifaders and Brigstock when I began, but at every stage of my work, I found myself stumbling across new facts and new possibilities. First, an exceptionally well-educated brother; then, an illegitimate nephew and niece; next, an unusual merging of lands with another brother; finally, the remarkable doodle. It has been my privilege to explore Cecilia’s life, and I hope this book has given readers a chance to grasp the human stories behind the abstract structures of medieval feudalism and manorialism. Cecilia was not mere smallfolk nor a halfling with hairy feet. Her story can be known in its factual details and interpreted in its complexity. Most of all, her story enriches our lives today. We see the medieval world of traditional histories—crusaders, kings, bishops, merchants—differently when we stand in Cecilia’s shoes. We see ourselves more clearly as well.
Suggestions for Further Reading
For Ermentrude, see Eileen Power, Medieval People (1924 and many subsequent editions); for Mengarde Clergue, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1978); for Bertrande de Rols, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983); for Elizabeth de Burgh, see Frances Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (2000).
