This chapter will consider the bourgeois wife, that is the wife of the urban craftsman or merchant running his own business and employing labour, in rather general terms, but I will begin with one specific wife about whom we know somewhat more than most. In the last years of the fourteenth and early years of the fifteenth century, Agnes, wife to the York mason Hugh Grantham, managed a relatively substantial and well-furnished house, supervised live-in servants, raised a son, attended diligently to her devotions, and ran a substantial brewing business. In some ways Agnes is not entirely typical of the wives of late medieval urban artisans. First, her husband, by reason of his craft, would regularly have worked away from home; for most artisans and their wives the workshop and the home were essentially one and the same and husbands would not have ‘gone out’ to work. Much the same is true of numbers of mercantile households. Second, Agnes is unusually well documented. A detailed probate inventory in respect of her husband, who predeceased her, survives, as do the comparatively full records of a matrimonial action in the ecclesiastical Court of York from only months after her husband’s death. This last tells how she fled the family home to avoid the attention of one John Dale, who had abducted and probably raped her in an attempt to secure her agreement to marry him.1 In many ways, however, Agnes reflects wider experience: the bourgeois wife was a home maker, a domestic manager, an economic partner, a sexual partner, and a mother. To understand ‘work’ in relation to the lives of such women by privileging the economic partnership alone and interrogating what craft or trade activity a woman might participate in seems both to undervalue the full range of activities that the bourgeois wife had to juggle and to disregard the value of their labour as home makers, as mothers, and as spouses. This present chapter is an attempt to view this range of activities holistically.
Documenting the bourgeois wife
Craft or, as I will tend to refer to them, artisanal households and mercantile households were at the very heart of the urban economy. They also played a key role in governance since householders were expected to exercise control over dependent members of the household.2 Trade, manufacture, and commerce were largely dependent upon these households and, indeed, very often physically located within them. Within a pre-industrial economy, craft workshops, which might double as retail spaces, were often physically part of the house.3 Even activities such as metal working, tanning, and dyeing were undertaken in relatively close proximity of the main dwelling. Mercantile traders often used the upper rooms of their houses as secure storage space and customers were invited into the house to view stock or negotiate terms.4 Only a privileged minority—in essence men who headed artisanal and mercantile households—enjoyed the status of citizens or burgesses; they alone had automatic rights to run retail premises and to take on and train apprentices.5 In larger towns and cities some third of households can be identified as artisanal or mercantile, often characterised by the presence of live-in servants.6 Many of the remaining two thirds of households would have been dependent on these privileged households for employment and even some meals. Many artisanal and mercantile households engaged journeymen, who did not live with their employers and might be married with families of their own. These workers would be provided with meals during the working day.7 Numbers of others, particularly women pieceworkers, such as carders, spinsters, and seamstresses, were employed by mercantile households following a proto-industrial model.8 We should also notice numbers of petty retailers such as hucksters of bread and tapsters or barmaids, who likewise owed their livelihoods to mercantile and artisanal employers.
From a documentary perspective the artisanal and mercantile households just described were primarily associated with male householders, who were themselves identified by a craft or trade. Thus the Grantham household in Petergate, York, would have been identified as the household headed by Hugh Grantham, mason. It is Hugh’s name, not Agnes’, that is listed in the city’s franchise register, even though Agnes ran a substantial brewing business in her own right.9 It is Hugh, likewise, who would have been expected to exercise order and discipline over his mesnie—that is, his household dependents—and Hugh who would have taken responsibility for household debts. This comparative documentary invisibility of wives is, however, but one facet of a larger and more nuanced story. The documentary record is often concerned primarily with the public identity of the householder, with whom rested formal responsibility for the ways in which the activities of the household impinged upon the public sphere. The actual internal dynamics of the household are both more complex, but also more difficult to recover.
The problem of documentation is graphically illustrated in respect of evidence for the wives of artisans assisting their husbands in his craft. There exists little substantive evidence to show that wives normally worked as craft helpers. A witness in a matrimonial cause within the ecclesiastical Court of York explained, by way of upholding the reputation of another key witness, that Juliana del Grene made her livelihood as a carder of wool and by following ‘the craft of the saddler with her husband’ and that she and another key witness had ‘goods to the value of ten pounds’ in the form of ‘silver and household utensils’.10 The implication was that she was an honest, hardworking woman of some means and thus unlikely to have been bribed, but it also provides a rare statement that this particular wife assisted her husband in his craft. The statement is all the more valuable because other indicators are that the leather trades, including saddlery, tended to favour male labour in contrast to the textile or victualling trades.11 A second example is slightly more oblique. In the last years of the fourteenth century, the founders’ craft of York registered ordinances before the mayor and these were duly entered into the city’s A/Y Memorandum Book. One clause concerned apprentices. In order to ensure that apprentices were adequately trained, to protect against an oversupply of prospective craft masters, and to prevent masters using apprentices as a source of cheap labour to undercut their fellow craft members, provisions to limit the number of apprentices a master was allowed at any one moment were commonplace at this date. Entirely atypically, however, the founders added a rider. Giles de Bonoyne was permitted a second apprentice ‘because he has no wife’.12 Why should Giles be permitted an extra apprentice merely because he lacked a wife? Implicitly because he had lost his wife—he would not have set up in trade in the first place without a spouse to help him, so it is hardly likely that he had simply never married; without a wife to assist him, he was short of help in the workshop and taking on an additional apprentice offered a form of compensation for this. Clearly he could simply have hired additional labour from a skilled journeyman, but in the high-wage economy at the end of the fourteenth century, an additional apprentice represented an inexpensive and—because resident with the employer—highly dependable extra pair of hands. The third example reinforces the second. The Coventry cappers’ ordinances of 1496 provided that ‘no persone of the Craft teche no point of his Craft to no persone save to his prentes [apprentice] and his wife’.13 We may also note that both the York curriers’ ordinances of 1424 and the undated tapiters’ ordinances made explicit reference to wives working in the craft.14
These few documentary examples can be set alongside the literary evidence of the conduct text ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’. Although in origin this poem predated the plague, it seems to have circulated in urban and particularly metropolitan contexts for the next couple of centuries. The text appears in household compilations where it is likely to have been used to socialise adolescent girls for marriage and becoming householders in their own right. In so doing, it offers guidance on how a bourgeois wife and mistress of a household should behave—indeed Felicity Riddy has argued that the text may first have been used as much to socialise wives and mothers as adolescent servant girls living away from home.15 The extant versions of the text are not only found in what appear to have been urban manuscripts, but the variant versions of the text imagine an artisanal household where the mistress has some oversight of servants, and where there is a workshop and some sense of an urban identity. There is, however, nothing that would make the text incongruous in a rural artisanal household. The important point here is that the imaginary wife is told that she must assist in the workshop when the need arises. She is also advised that, in her husband’s absence, she should lock up the workshop at the end of the day, in addition to directing the servants—a generic term for all employees which does not necessarily imply live-in servants alone—and ensuring that all are properly and promptly paid their wages.16 We should be wary of reading conduct literature as a simple mirror of social practice, but in the light of the York and Coventry evidence it suggests at least a cultural expectation that the bourgeois wife was to be present in the workshop at least some of the time and that this was understood as very much part of such a wife’s identity.
‘How the Goodwife’, as a text directed at adolescents likely in service, provides another clue as to how and why wives of artisans were in a position to make a useful contribution in the workshop. Whereas young men who aspired to becoming craft masters with workshops of their own often found positions as apprentices, relatively few women were apprenticed formally and then only in a very restricted range of occupations around embroidery and working in silk. It is likely that outside of London the female apprentice was a rarity.17 Going into service—that is, living in an artisanal or mercantile household on contracts that normally ran for a year at a time, though sometimes longer—was a common experience for girls growing up within urban communities. This was also true for many girls born in the countryside who were sent to town as adolescents.18 Employers provided food, clothing and a place to sleep.19 They also provided informal training in a whole range of household and craft skills, moral guidance and advice, which could be reinforced by discipline. Occasionally they physically or sexually abused their charges, but also, we suspect, in some instances provided genuine affection.20 Servants provided general labour. The particular boon to their employers in the labour-starved decades of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was that their labour was both cheap and dependable. Although servants had time off—the slight evidence points particularly to evenings and holidays (holy days)—they were in principle always at their employers’ beck and call. Contracts could be renewed when both servant and employer were satisfied with one another, but the servant girl was normally free to leave after a year in the hope of finding better terms and conditions. Equally, the employer who took on a girl barely in her teens to help mind the children and run errands may not have found her so useful once she had grown into a young adult.
Learning to become a bourgeois wife
The informality of the training provided to adolescent and young adult women by the institution of life-cycle service makes it much less visible in the records. We have, however, a few clues. Depositions from the Court of York show female servants assisting in a mercantile shop and helping to carry goods to a customer’s home. A tanner’s male employee remembered having to fetch water from the river—necessary for both domestic and industrial use—while a female servant was temporarily absent. From yet another case we glimpse a female servant lighting candles and tucking a woman up in bed at night.21 An erotically charged poem, ‘The Serving Maid’s Holiday’, which appears rural and agricultural in context, ostensibly tells us of all the tasks the female servant is able to leave aside—and the few she still has to complete—because she has the day off. These include both domestic tasks, such as sweeping floors, preparing rushes, and kneading, and economic activities, including weaving, spinning, and milking the cow.22 The important point is that the female servant was expected to learn and to perform a wide range of tasks. Whereas the male apprentice might, and did, complain vociferously if he were diverted from craft activity to menial tasks, the female servant was expected to juggle tasks without complaint and as directed.23 That some of the time these tasks made her an integral part of the workshop is indirectly, but tellingly, suggested by the propensity of many workshops to employ some female servants in the later fourteenth century when labour was scarce. This was an era of labour shortage consequent upon the ravages of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics which consequently particularly advantaged women in the labour force. Textile, victualling, and mercantile households seem particularly to have preferred female over male servants (including apprentices). This pattern was, however, eroded during the course of the fifteenth century as the economy contracted and the resultant growth in competition for work tended to marginalise women workers. By the later fifteenth century artisanal households tended no longer to employ female servants, who came to be largely concentrated in mercantile households. These last may have employed numbers of servants as a mark of wealth and status, but perhaps primarily as domestic help or shop assistants.24 As the female employee moved between households during the course of her adolescence, she probably also worked in more than one type of workshop. It follows that women were effectively trained as teenagers and young adults to assist in a range of domestic and craft activities, but also to be versatile and adaptable so as to fit within whatever workshop she subsequently married into.
The corollary of this period of socialisation in the years prior to marriage was that women who had had experience as servants, at least in the century following the Black Death, would have been well grounded both in the skills needed to run a home, but also in those transferable skills—and the capacity to learn—that would be of value in the workshop regardless of their eventual husband’s occupation. Scholars who doubt the extent to which women were involved in craft production or trade may point to the exiguous nature of the evidence for female apprentices, the like paucity of evidence for women admitted as burgesses or citizens—and hence able to set up shop and train apprentices—in their own right, and the lack of reference to women in guild ordinances. But this is an optical illusion. Young bourgeois women were neither socialised nor expected to set up workshops and businesses in their own right, but they were socialised and expected to marry men who did. Moreover the young woman who had spent time in service was likely seen as an asset by a young man seeking to find a wife to help him run a business. Certainly there is plenty of evidence that former servants, including male apprentices, tended to marry other former servants, having sometimes conducted courtships while in service.25 The evidence showing that the widows of artisans regularly continued to manage the workshop following their husbands’ deaths strengthens this argument, though once again this seems to have become less common by the later fifteenth century. Indeed numbers of later fourteenth-century craft ordinances recorded in the A/Y Memorandum Book kept by the civic government in York were attested by female craft members, all presumably widows.26
Contributing to the familial economy
As the example of Juliana del Grene immediately demonstrates, the direct economic contribution of wives to the household economy was not confined to assisting husbands in their trade. We are told that Juliana worked in ‘kempstercraft’ or the carding of wool. Carding and spinning were primary processes necessary to support textile production. They were seen as quintessentially women’s work that girls probably learned from an early age. Indeed most women would have engaged in one or the other since the product of a single weaver demanded the production of many spinsters and carders. In practice, however, we tend to know more about women whose livelihood was dependent on spinning than about married women who spun to supplement the familial economy. The 1395 inventory of Robert de Crakall, another York mason, itemises eight stones of wool, two pairs of cards (for carding), and three wheels—implicitly spinning wheels in the chamber—alongside various beds, bedding, clothing, and a cradle, a pattern that suggests that women socialised together while engaged in spinning and perhaps keeping an eye on the baby.27 In several other inventories, spinning wheels and cards are located in the hall, which could indicate that carding and spinning were activities carried on, inter alia, alongside recreational activity of an evening.28 Spinning, however, was probably primarily a daytime activity. Depositions from a later fourteenth-century disputed marriage case from York tell us how from the doorway of the hall, Mariota de Walde, her friend Margaret, and her husband’s apprentice John listened in on Mariota’s husband and his mistress, his servant Joan, in the adjacent garden. When her husband made to come in, Mariota rushed to her spinning wheel in the hall. John was not so lucky. His master chased him into the garden and struck him hard on the foot with a staff.29
Brewing was another activity that numbers of young women would have gained knowledge of as servants, but with which again some girls migrating from the countryside might well have been familiar from childhood. Agnes Grantham, for example, employed female servants in her brewing business and brewing seems to have been very much a female activity in better-off peasant households.30 Once again York probate inventories demonstrate that a number of well-to-do artisanal households engaged in brewing alongside the craft activity of the household head, though some of the largest enterprises were, like the Grantham household, associated with masons whose work necessarily regularly took them outside the home and whose wives would probably not have been particularly active in the trade. This is true of the households of Robert de Crakall and the Beverley mason, John Cadeby, but separate brewhouses are also found in the homes of a barber, a baker, a girdler, a merchant, and a skinner.31
Other commercial activities on the part of wives undertaken independently of their husbands are still harder to notice. Margery Kempe, who had turned her hand to brewing supposedly without success, briefly managed a horse-mill in the earlier fifteenth century, but we would not know this from Lynn’s extant administrative or probate records.32 At much the same date Robert Schylbotyll of Scarborough appears to have managed a hostelry, and owned a horse and a horse-mill, but there is nothing to indicate whether his wife managed this part of the business, brewed in the brewhouse, or helped by seeing to guests and ensuring that clean bedding and tablecloths were provided.33 Butchers’ wives seem to have specialised in making use of offal and fat. As is apparent from Norwich market, they might prepare and also sell black puddings and they are also found manufacturing Paris or tallow candles.34 The York saucemakers’ ordinances from 1417 noted that not only did butchers’ wives make tallow candles, but also the wives of skinners and others ‘in great number’.35 Margaret Harman, who was married to a York weaver, likewise was the manufacturer of candles on some scale since she is observed in a case dated 1430 purchasing 23s 10d worth of candlewick, a quantity so large that it required two people to carry.36
The value of wives as assistants in the workshop and as providers of additional sources of income made marriage for the young man intending to set up in trade an imperative. This is implicit in the apprentice John Waryngton’s plea to his master when made to marry the fellow female servant he had seduced: ‘You are able to be so good and so generous towards me and can show me favour such that you can make me more willing to betroth and have her to my wife.’ Though unspecified, the implication is that he wanted his master to help him towards obtaining his own workshop, which would give him both the need for a wife and the means to support her.37 Completion of an apprenticeship, establishing a workshop, and marrying a wife were crucial life-stages that ideally coincided. For Waryngton, marrying a wife without having obtained the first two objectives was almost unimaginable. But the wife was more than a valued assistant in business, though it was probably often she who served customers at the shop window and it might be she who kept the accounts.38 A wife also shared her husband’s bed, gave birth to and suckled the children they had together, saw that meals were prepared and the house kept clean and orderly, oversaw at least the women servants, took charge in her husband’s absence, helped to entertain guests and, to borrow a cliché, made the house a home.
Household manager
The role of the wife as household manager is symbolised by her control of the keys that provided access to locked chests and cupboards in which vessels, napery, and drink were secured. A wife received the keys from her husband and was charged ‘with kepyng of all at evur þai had’.39 The eponymous Goodwife advised her daughter that when she was mistress of her own house, she should ‘take the keies into thi warde’.40 The thirteenth-century legal treatise known as ‘Bracton’ explains that a young woman came of age to inherit when ‘she knows how to order her house and do the things that belong to the arrangement and management of a house, provided she understands what pertains to “cove and keye”’, that is, closet and key. The text goes on to explain that ‘such things require discretion and understanding’ and hence a young woman must be at least thirteen or fourteen.41 In the sixth joy of the fifteenth-century French misogynistic satire Les quinze joyes de mariage, the wife pretends to have lost her keys when her husband brings four important guests to dinner and so ensures they have no napkins for the table, no towels with which to wash, no clean sheets or pillows for the beds, and no clean nightcaps.42 When Margery Kempe recovered from a bout of mental illness she asked her husband that she be given back the keys to the buttery, which he did despite the opposition of the women servants who said she would simply give away all the food and drink locked up there.43
As mistress of the household, wives had charge of the possessions in their care. A good wife would know the whereabouts and condition of every sheet and every utensil. This is clearly demonstrated in the 1450 will of Joan Buckland in respect of her country house at Edgcote (Northants). As the daughter of a London fishmonger who had married another London fishmonger, Joan was very much a bourgeoise, though her husband’s eventual success as a merchant and royal servant had made her a country landowner at his death. In the course of the will, Joan moves mentally from room to room remembering every item of furniture, every utensil, the colour and material of every bed hanging, the width of every sheet, and the numbers of silver spoons before finally moving out of the house to remember her carthorses, her cattle, and her tenants.44 Wives were responsible for ensuring that the household was supplied with fuel and kept warm. This is reflected in the prominence of provision of fuel to the poor on the part of female testators. Joan Johnson, for example, left at her death in 1474 ‘all the faggots to be distributed amongst Christ’s poor together with firewood (“Astilwod”) and turves’.45 That this was an extension of lifetime provision is indicated by the example of Agnes Grantham, with whom this chapter began, who was accustomed ‘to give alms to the poor by bringing them wood, fuel, and other necessaries’.46 A wife’s responsibility for feeding her household is similarly mirrored in an expectation that wives would help to feed the needy.47 A story in the Alphabet of Tales tells of a wife who failed to perform this duty. When she died it was suggested that alms be distributed for the benefit of her soul, but her husband refused, saying that she had not done this in her lifetime for the benefit of his soul and so he would not do it now for the benefit of her soul.48
We may presume that wives took responsibility for preparing meals, a point regularly asserted in the scholarly literature, but not something that appears to be especially well documented. In contemporary writings it is understood and so not specifically discussed. The French cookery manual Le viandier observes of a variety of everyday dishes and vegetables that ‘women and their mistresses and everyone knows how to cook them’.49 When the husband in Les quinze joyes sends word that he is bringing guests home, it is plainly understood that his wife is expected to organise their entertainment by her own efforts and by directing the servants, but instead she deliberately sends the servants out on pointless errands and retires to her room claiming illness.50 The York cooks’ ordinances dated 1425 refer specifically to the wives of various other craftsmen who sold foodstuffs that they have cooked.51 Visual sources, albeit not necessarily English, are more telling. In manuscripts of the Tacuinum sanitatis it is regularly women who are depicted as engaged in cooking, for example roasting meats, cooking the legs and feet of young animals, cooking tripe, or preparing wheaten soup. Often more than one woman is engaged and it is not entirely clear which, if any, is the mistress and which the female servants, but in some instances it would appear to be the mistress aided by a servant.52 There is a well-known image from an early fourteenth-century Flemish manuscript of a woman holding a baby on her knee while she stirs a cooking pot with her left hand. A small boy applies bellows to the fire beneath.53 This is not an image suggestive of a bourgeois context, but helps to reinforce a cultural understanding that cooking, like childcare, was seen as women’s work.
As probate inventories show, the bourgeois house was often moderately well equipped for cooking. More substantial houses might have detached kitchens, but some would have allowed for cooking to take place over a hearth associated with the hall. Hugh Grantham’s inventory lists, inter alia, brass pots, frying pans, pewter vessels, and mortars. Also itemised under the same heading of ‘coquina’ were a cow and calf, a cockerel, four hens, four capons, and a couple of ducks.54 Grantham was not alone in keeping a cow. Two other earlier fifteenth-century York inventories show that Thomas Overdo, a baker, and William Garton also kept cows in outbuildings.55 John Cadeby, a mason of Beverley, likewise kept ducks and chickens, but also pigs in his garden.56 The Grantham, Overdo, and Garton households were thus supplied with fresh milk, and fresh eggs were available to the Cadeby and Grantham households. Cadeby’s household also had access to fresh pork. Wives would again have supervised the care and regular milking of the cow and the feeding of the chickens since these tasks were seen as women’s work.57 Garton’s inventory further lists ‘fruits and herbs in the garden’ as extensions of the woodshed entry, a reminder that even small garden areas were often exploited to produce vegetables and herbs for both culinary and medicinal purposes. Once again the cultivation of gardens and the provision of primary health care takes us firmly into the wife’s domain.58
Childcare
The much put-upon peasant wife in a later fifteenth-century poem dubbed by its nineteenth-century editors ‘The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband’ tells how she is kept awake at night by their child and how in the morning the children will wake up and start crying and so she had to attend them.59 The wife of this poem is especially burdened because she has no servant to assist her, but in mentioning the demands of childrearing the text unusually draws attention to something that is otherwise uncommented on. The rather earlier, though popular over many years, ‘How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter’ advises that children should be sharply disciplined and a mother should start to collect against a daughter’s marriage from the time she is born, but otherwise has nothing to say about the rearing of children.60 Again the point is about significant silences. A bourgeois wife would likely have given birth every two to three years or so until she reached her forties. Maternal breastfeeding was likely the norm except for some mercantile wives, and infants were not fully weaned until aged three.61 The fourteen children that Margery Kempe, mayor’s daughter and merchant’s wife, had with her husband fits an elite pattern of fertility unmoderated by the contraceptive effect of nursing, though for all mothers infant mortality, especially high in the post-plague decades, would have much reduced the actual numbers of children alive at any given moment. What we may extrapolate is that most bourgeois wives would have spent many years suckling young children, a number being pregnant, and many more actually caring for children. This was crucial work. Younger children might contribute little to labour requirements of the household and older children may often have been sent into service in other households, but most men would probably have liked a son to succeed them. Younger sons could enter the Church and so offer spiritual succour. Both daughters and sons might enter into marriages that reinforced existing social and trade networks or helped to forge new ones. Children could also be expected to offer some comfort in old age.
Beyond the commonplace claim that it was mothers and womenfolk who cared for children, there is almost no scholarship on medieval childcare and bourgeois childcare in particular. Barbara Hanawalt’s classic and highly influential article on peasant childrearing is predicated on refuting the view attributed to Ariès that parents were not emotionally attached to their children. It offers a number of suggestions pertaining to age and gender based on a statistical analysis of coroners’ rolls, but the underlying evidential basis is profoundly flawed. In fact the coroners’ evidence points to a degree of benign neglect, irrespective of sex, at least of younger children. Whereas younger children and boys generally may often have been left to their own devices, older girls may have been more constrained.62 For bourgeois society the picture differs again. Whereas in peasant society much work and even socialising took place outdoors, place of work and place of residence coincided in the artisanal household. Manuscript representations of the Holy Family show Joseph carpentering and Mary sewing, weaving, or spinning, while the young Jesus plays within sight of both parents.63 It is in this bourgeois context of more substantial houses with comparatively level floors that the baby-walker, ubiquitous as a symbol of infancy in art—and which the baby Jesus is using in a Holy Family miniature from the Morgan Library’s Hours of Catherine of Cleves—could have been afforded and would have been practical. It is, moreover, in this urban and implicitly bourgeois context that we find evidence for purchased toys, such as pewter miniature utensils and knights.64 This then is a level of society with the interest and resources to spend time with their children, to take an interest in their development, and to encourage their play. It may well be that little girls were encouraged to play with miniature cooking utensils and little boys with miniature knights. It may also be that they were discouraged from wandering into the street, both because the busier streets of the town were dangerous for small children and because bourgeois parents may not have wanted their youngsters mixing with the children of parents who were regularly out at work during the day.
How much childcare was hands-on for mothers and how much was delegated to female servants we cannot know. The evidence of the later fourteenth-century poll taxes and the mention of servants in wills suggests that artisanal households regularly employed at least one servant, and often two or more.65 Although the propensity to hire female servants varied considerably according to the occupation of the male head, in the century after the plague it was common that, where more than one servant was employed, at least one would have been female. We may suppose, therefore, that wives often had direct oversight of at least one female servant even if that servant, like the wife herself, was employed in the workshop alongside domestic duties. Wives would have had to instruct their charges in how to perform various tasks, be they how to cook certain dishes, to brew ale, to set the table, or to receive guests, although the servant could have been expected to bring some knowledge of cleaning, spinning, fetching water, and childcare from their natal homes. Servant girls from rural backgrounds would probably have known how to milk a cow or to care for poultry. It is likely that the moral supervision of such adolescent girls and young women fell specifically to wives, something that is reflected in the circulation of a text like ‘How the Goodwife’. This last itself advises careful supervision of all ‘þi meyne’ and charges the wife to ensure that servants are paid promptly and generously.66 It is likely that wives passed on some of their clothing to their female servants; servants leaving to get married often received cooking utensils and bedding, but probably also advice about married life.
‘Kinship work’: Forging social networks
It is possible, but so far as I am aware yet to be explored, that employment of servants might sometimes serve to help reinforce ties between households. Certainly it is apparent that servants were sometimes kin, but there is also evidence that they were sometimes connected by ties of trade, and that these may in fact represent business associations and even friendships. Joan Kyrkby was the daughter of John Kyrkby, a dyer, and craft associate of John Usburn who was employing Joan as one of his servants at his death in 1428.67 Of course it would have been Usburn’s wife Elena who would have had most immediate supervision of Joan, and we may speculate that she had played a role in engaging Joan in the first place. Wives’ kin and friendship networks are sometimes apparent from the carefully itemised bequests of clothing, household goods, and devotional items such as beads, to other women, so characteristic of the wills of wives and of widows. Such women’s networks would have reinforced male networks and also extended their husbands’ range of personal contacts. These contacts may in turn have impacted positively on the business of the household.68 The long-established business partnership between the drapers William Pountfret and John Thornton can, for example, only have been strengthened by the obviously close friendship between Avice Pountfret and Katherine Thornton, their respective wives: Avice described Katherine as ‘my faithful friend’ in her will and named her as executor alongside her husband.69 In a cash-starved economy networks of credit were essential, but personal contacts could also have translated into custom or recommendations for custom, in other words, a wife’s work helping to build and maintain kin and friendship ties may have impacted directly upon the success of the household economy. Women also used networks to promote the careers of family members. When Agnes Grantham received an invitation to dine with the Master of St Leonard’s hospital, whose household she supplied with ale, she saw it as an opportunity to try to secure a preferment for her son, who was pursuing a clerical career.
As we saw obliquely earlier in Les quinze joyes, dining and entertaining guests was a key activity for bourgeois wives. In more prosperous and mercantile households especially, such entertaining was necessary in order to test and reinforce trust or to build new business relationships. For example, the York merchant Robert Lascelles and his wife Isabel entertained Margaret Harman and her husband for dinner, using their summer hall for the purpose. Margaret, a chandler, seems to have traded with Robert, who may well have stocked her candles. We know this because at the dinner Margaret allegedly acknowledged before her husband that she had purchased on credit the very large quantity of candlewick noted earlier from Robert. This was used as evidence in a breach of promise action in the ecclesiastical court when Margaret failed to repay Robert, presumably because the business relationship went sour.70 Wives probably had some influence, moreover, in organising the furnishing of the hall to create a comfortable and welcoming space for entertaining. We see this in the presence of cushions, coloured textile hangings and coverings, ample sitting places and furniture, such as a cupboard.71 It was likely also the wife’s role simply to make the living areas comfortable and attractive for her husband.
Chamber work: Sex and intimacy
The wife’s work extended to the more intimate space of the chamber. Again the comfortably furnished chambers with their colourful coverlets and bed curtains, their feather pillows and linen sheets, and their secure chests as found, for example, in the 1415 inventory of the York vintner Robert Talkan, may owe something to wives’ influence on household budgeting underpinned by their own contribution to the household economy.72 It was in this space that wives were permitted to question or even challenge their husband’s conduct, whereas earlier in the day they would have dutifully kept silent before others, to urge moderation and promote harmony. The Knight of the Tower, for example, advises ‘when she shall fynd hym alone and tyme but that she may reprehende hym in shewyng curtoysly that he had wrong and unright with hym’. He goes on to suggest that a reasonable husband would be duly grateful to his wife.73 When John Bown’s apprentice, John Waryngton, was so sure that his irate master had done wrong by him it was to his mistress, Margaret Bown, that he complained, presumably in the hope that she would quietly win his master round.74 Whereas the paterfamilias had to keep firm and strict discipline, wives, like queens, were permitted to intercede and to urge clemency in the governance of the household.
The most intimate duty of the wife—that is, to have sex with her husband—may not immediately be understood as work or as an activity having an economic value, but neither interpretation is in fact straightforward. Indeed, the eponymous young wife in a text tentatively attributed to Lydgate describes sex as ‘chambre werk’.75 Chaucer, in his ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ about a merchant and his wife, makes puns on tale, tail (= pudenda), and tally so as to create or play on cultural resonances between sex, commerce, and the marital debt.76 Perhaps more telling, however, is the case of Margery Kempe, daughter of a merchant and married to a merchant. Margery’s pursuit of celibacy was resisted by her husband since, in his words, ‘now may I usyn you with-owtyn dedly synne’, but he came to agree in return for her paying his debts.77 These are not easy texts to read as evidence of social practice or ideology, but there is an implication to be drawn that husbands expected to have regular sexual intercourse with their wives and that bourgeois and mercantile wives understood providing sexual services as a form of work.78 I do not suppose that—pace Kempe—wives also imagined that this work had an economic value, but it was nevertheless a real contribution to the success of the household that so depended on the partnership of the master and the mistress. There is, however, a more immediate economic value to the wife’s work in bed.
Husbands who did not find their wives willing or able to satisfy them in bed might stray and, by purchasing sexual services elsewhere—whether with a sex-worker or a mistress—haemorrhage household resources. More importantly, any failure of the orderly dynamics of the conjugal relationship that was central to the success of the household impacted on the effective authority and reputation of the head, and thus on his ability to exercise discipline. This is dramatically illustrated by the fortunes of the household of the York goldsmith William Snawschill. In 1442 one of his male servants was presented for fornication with two different women, one of whom was his fellow servant. The following year another female servant in the Snawschill household was similarly presented for fornication with one of the Minster’s vicars choral. Two years later Snawschill’s wife Alice was presented for adultery.79 At much the same time another York household presided over by Thomas Peny saw disorder as a consequence of Peny’s unmarried state. He seems to have had a long-running affair with Joan Smyth, but by the mid-1450s also had a simultaneous relationship with Marion, the wife of John Bosse. In the absence of a vigilant wife to set an example, these affairs no doubt distracted Peny from keeping proper surveillance of his servant Joan, who in time became pregnant by a cordwainer.80
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that work too narrowly defined offers only a rather myopic picture of the past. In a culture that liked to imagine households to be headed by men who enjoyed a clear and singular craft identity, wives and their activities at first appear marginal and comparatively invisible. Such a magisterial perspective, however, is readily undercut even by the very sources generated by urban governors and the courts they administered: not all households were headed by men and the household was often associated with a range of commercial activities sometimes recognised even in guild ordinances registered before the mayor. When the governors of Beverley issued an ordinance in 1493 ‘that ther shall no man occupy none occupacyon … bott allonely that att he is brother withal, and in clothyng’, they added the clarification ‘And att evere man be in clothynge with the crafte that he moste gets hys lyffyng by’.81 Such an acknowledgement that livelihoods were rarely made solely from a single trade is atypical, but no less valid for that. It is often wives who were active in other enterprises that, like brewing or spinning, grew out of production for domestic consumption. We have to look with care to notice these activities, but they are documented precisely because they impacted the marketplace beyond the home. The same is less true of activities that are more completely contained within the house, but by drawing upon a range of sources, and particularly narrative sources, the dynamics of the household become a little clearer.82 Husbands appear as household heads, but so much of the day-to-day management of the household and quite possibly aspects of the household budget were in the hands of wives. Here we may recover a bourgeois femininity, marked by a concern to demonstrate good household management, a concern to ensure that the home was a place of comfort and cleanliness, that servants worked diligently and brought no shame on their employers, that guests were received hospitably, that husbands were served according to the marriage vows at board and in bed, and that children grew up dutiful to their parents and their God. To see this range of activities as essentially discrete and unrelated or to deny them the label ‘work’ is to misconstrue what it was to be a bourgeois wife.
Notes
1The case is York, Borthwick Institute for Archives (hereafter BI), CP.F.36. I have translated some of the depositions in Women in England, c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources, ed. and trans. P.J.P. Goldberg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 152–55. The case is discussed as ‘Brewing Trouble: The Devout Widow’s Tale’, in Jeremy Goldberg, Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 129–45.
2Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The Regulation of Labour in Medieval English Towns’, in The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg, and W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000).
3David Clark, ‘The Shop Within? An Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops’, Architectural History 43 (2000).
4Clark, ‘The Shop Within?’, 72–74; P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Gender and Space in the Later Medieval House’, Viator 42 (2011).
5In fact numbers of towns such as Nottingham and Canterbury seem to have operated a second tier of annual licences to trade.
6P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 161, table 4.1.
7Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 75, 133.
8Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 118–22.
9See n. 1 above.
10Deposition of John Wyrsdall in BI, CP.E.159 in Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England, 107.
11Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, chapter 3.
12‘a cause qil nad nulle femme’: Maud Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, 2 vols., Surtees Society 120, 125 (Durham: Andrews and Co.,1912–15), 1:106.
13Mary Dormer Harris, ed., Coventry Leet Book, EETS O.S. 134, 135, 138, 146 (London: Kegan Paul, 1907–13), 574.
14Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, 2:169, 190.
15Felicity Riddy, ‘Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text’, Speculum 71 (1996).
16‘How the Good Wijf tauƷt Hir DouƷtir’, in The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS O.S. 32 (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1868), 36–47.
17Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Education and Training of Girls in Fifteenth-Century London’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Diana Dunn (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1996); Richard Goddard, ‘Female Apprenticeship in the West Midlands in the Later Middle Ages’, Midland History 27 (2002); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 142–44.
18Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 290–91.
19Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 168–86; Stephanie Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship in the Records of the Goldsmiths’ Company of London, 1444–1500’, Medieval Prosopography 22 (2001); Stephanie Ruth Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship in Later Medieval London, c. 1300–c. 1530’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2006); Hanawalt, Growing Up, 135, 180–81.
20Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 183–84; P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘What was a Servant?’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000); Hanawalt, Growing Up, 160–61, 170–71, 185–88, 190–91.
21Goldberg, ed., Women in England, 105 (deposition of Walter de Mellerby), 153–54 (deposition of Agnes Kyrkeby).
22Of course the distinction is somewhat arbitrary and artificial since in this implicitly rural context both the woven cloth and the milk were likely used, at least in part, for household consumption. ‘The Serving Maid’s Holiday’, in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 24–25.
23Hanawalt, Growing Up, 156, 160.
24Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 194–202.
25Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 232, 257, 259–61.
26E.g., the glovers and parchment makers, and the dyers: Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, 1:50, 82, 112.
27Philip M. Stell, trans., Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1300–1500, Historical Sources for York Archaeology 2, 3 (York: York Archaeological Trust, 2006), 494.
28Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 517, 521, 534, 610.
29BI, CP.E.111 (1372).
30Goldberg, ‘Brewing Trouble’, 132–33; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 111–14, 141–44; Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
31Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 494, 524, 535, 551, 559–60, 566, 581. John Stubbes, the barber, likely ran a hostelry in addition to his York barber’s business and so brewing may have been an aspect of this other business.
32Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS O.S. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 9–11.
33Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 525–27; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 136.
34Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 109, 133.
35Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, 1:155–56.
36Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 134.
37BI, CP.F.127; deposition of John Gamesby in Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England, 111.
38The English evidence for essentially ephemeral small business accounts is exiguous. Regulations of the Leiden fullers’ craft from the late fifteenth century forbade wives from keeping their husbands’ accounts alongside their own, a sure indication that hitherto wives there had kept business accounts without censure: Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 91.
39Mary Macleod Banks, ed., Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon, EETS O.S. 126–27 (London: Kegan Paul, 1904–05), 1:66, no. LXXXIV.
40‘Take the keys into your care’: ‘How the Good Wijf’, 42, l. 133.
41Bracton, On the Laws and Customs of England, trans. Samuel E. Thorne, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1968) 2:250–51.
42Richard Aldington, trans., The Fifteen Joys of Marriage (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.), 135–37.
43Meech and Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, 8.
44Andrew Clark, ed., Lincoln Diocese Documents, 1450–1544, EETS O.S. 149 (London, Kegan Paul, 1914), 37–45; Jenny Stratford, ‘Joan Buckland (d. 1462)’, in Medieval London Widows, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 113–28. Joan made a later will which was similarly detailed.
45P.H. Cullum, ‘“And Hir Name was Charite”: Charitable Giving by and for Women in Late Medieval Yorkshire’, in Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c. 1200–1500, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 196–97, 208 n. 87.
46Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England, 153.
47Cullum, ‘“And Hir Name was Charite”’, 191.
48Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, 1:66, no. LXXXIV.
49Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983), 22.
50Aldington, trans., The Fifteen Joys, 133–37.
51Such potential rivals to the cooks were only to cook commercially if they were ‘capable’ (habiles). Presumably even the cooks realised that they could hardly prevent wives who regularly cooked using these skills to supplement household incomes: Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, 2:160.
52Two of the most frequently reproduced manuscripts are Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS NAL 1673, and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS series nova 2644.
53Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 6, fol. 22. This is used in Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 176.
54James Raine, ed., Testamenta Eboracensia, vol. 3, Surtees Society 45 (Durham: Andrews and Co., 1865), 48–49; Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 518. Grantham also possessed oxen outside of York, presumably as a source of income rather than primarily for domestic consumption.
55Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 563, 567.
56Stell, trans., Probate Inventories, 560.
57Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 139–40.
58Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 11; Hanawalt, Ties that Bound, 147.
59Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, eds., Reliquiae antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 2:197.
60‘How the Good Wijf’, 46, ll. 188–201.
61The frequency of births suggested here follows the patterns described by Dorothy McLaren from early modern English sources for sections of the population practising extended maternal breastfeeding. Whereas there is evidence that the medieval English aristocracy regularly employed live-in wet-nurses, there is little to suggest that this practice was used elsewhere save perhaps in some mercantile households: Dorothy McLaren, ‘Marital Fertility and Lactation, 1570–1720’, in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 38–46; P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval England: A Social History, 1250–1550 (London: Arnold, 2004), 28, 80–81.
62Hanawalt is relatively uncritical of her source material and by grouping a large number of verdicts from different dates and counties she fails to notice very significant variations in the propensity to report child fatalities that cast serious doubts over the value of her findings: Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Later Medieval England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977); P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘The Public and the Private: Women in the Pre-Plague Economy’, in Thirteenth Century England III, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1991); P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval England’, Viator 39 (2008).
63E.g., Hours of Catherine of Cleves, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M. 917, p. 149.
64Geoff Egan, ‘Children’s Pastimes in Past Time: Medieval Toys Found in the British Isles’, in Material Culture in Medieval Europe: Papers of the Medieval Brugge 1997 Conference, 7, ed. Guy de Boe and Frans Verhaeghe (Zellik: Insituut voor het Archeologisch Patrimonium, 1997).
65Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 161, table 4.1; 181, table 4.4.
66‘How the Good Wijf’, 42–43, ll. 125–30, 139–42.
67Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 177–78.
68Cf. Katherine J. Lewis, ‘Women, Testamentary Discourse and Life-Writing in Later Medieval England’, in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000). It has been observed by scholars of later eras that ‘kinship work’, the active cultivation of kinship ties, was often understood as the work of wives. See, for example, Micaela Di Leonardo, ‘The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families and the Work of Kinship’, Signs 12 (1987).
69‘fidel’ socie mee’: BI, Prob. Reg. 3, fols. 111–12. I discuss Pountfret and Thornton at length in ‘Brewing Trouble’ (see n. 1 above): Pountfret gave shelter to Agnes Grantham and Thornton entered into a contract of marriage with her.
70Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England, 239–43.
71Cf. the York inventories of Robert Talkan, vintner and mayor, or of John Carter, tailor: Raine, ed., Testamenta Eboracensia, 3:87–89, 300–04.
72P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘The Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity in Later Medieval England: A Material Culture Perspective’, in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski and P.J.P. Goldberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 137–38; Raine, ed., Testamenta Eboracensia, 3:88.
73William Caxton, trans., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M.Y. Offord, EETS SS 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 35. The author offers this advice after recounting the story of the bourgeois wife who challenged her husband publicly before witnesses and refused to hold her tongue. He, moved to anger, struck his wife, knocking her to the ground and breaking her nose. The wife’s consequent disfigurement is held up as her punishment for her improper public challenge to her husband’s authority.
74BI, CP.F.127; Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England, 110–14; P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Masters and Men in Later Medieval England’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn Hadley (London: Longman, 1999). The Knight of the Tower gave with approval the example of one of King David’s wives who persuaded her husband not to put Absalon to death for the murder of his half-brother Amnon even though she was not his mother: Caxton, trans., Knight of the Tower, 124–25.
75John Lydgate (?), Prohemy of a Mariage Betwixt an Olde Man and a Yonge Wife, and the Counsail, in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Mary Ellzey and Douglass Moffatt, rev. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2002), l. 432. I owe this reference to Hollie Morgan.
76Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Shipman’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 203–08, esp. ll. 413–17, 453–54; Ardis Butterfield, ‘France’, in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 40–41. As Davis shows, this is not the only moment where the Canterbury Tales offers ‘a critique of the commodification of human relations’: James Davis, Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 88–90.
77Meech and Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, 24. He also required that the couple continued to share a bed and that Margery cease her custom of fasting on Fridays.
78Cf. Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2012), 108–09. A fifteenth-century verse ‘Arise Early’ concludes its brief instructions for how properly to organise the day by informing its male reader to ‘Goo to thy bed myrely / And lye therin jocundly / And plesse and loffe thy wyffe dewly / And basse hyr onys or tewyis myrely’: Nicola McDonald, ‘Fragments of (Have Your) Desire: Brome Women at Play’, in Medieval Domesticity, ed. Kowaleski and Goldberg, 255.
79Goldberg, ‘Masters and Men’, 64.
80Peny was also presented for fornication with a third woman: Goldberg, ‘Masters and Men’, 63–64.
81Arthur F. Leach, ed., Beverley Town Documents, Selden Society 14 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1900), 59. The very last clause seems subsequently to have been crossed through.
82For a discussion of the value of narrative sources, be they court records or conduct literature, see Jeremy Goldberg, ‘Some Reflections on Women, Work, and the Family in the Later Medieval English Town’, in Ser Mujer en la Ciudad Medieval Europea, ed. Jesús Á. Solórzano Telechea, Beatriz Arízaga Bolumburu, and Amélia Aguiar Andrande (Longroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2013), especially 209ff.
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