Fake History Hunter

This book is a classic, very well known, but it’s almost as old as I am.
I always warn people about old history books, we learn new things about the past almost every day, not just because of archaeological finds, new technology such as DNA but also because there are so many records that simply haven’t been researched yet.
So it really doesn’t take long before a history book can be considered outdated.
For instance, books that seriously look at hygiene in medieval Europe based on actual records in stead of just repeating what earlier historians thought, are shockingly recent, something that wasn’t much of a thing till this side of AD 2000.

Keeping that in mind, there’s a reason I still wanted to review this book.
Not only is it a great book, but it was also its time ahead in quite a few ways.
Making it both an old book but not that outdated.
It’s also about daily life for common people, my favourite subject.

What makes this book so unique for its time?
Hanawalt used historical records for her research, not battle reports, political writings, etc. but the day to day paperwork of the courts.
Today that is quite common, as the topic of what life was like for peasants has become more popular, more and more historians vanish into the archives to go through countless pages of mundane paperwork.
But in the 1980s this was not that common a way way of looking at things.
Besides finding out a lot about what life really was like, we also get the wonderful experience of learning the names and stories of people who else would have vanished into the mists of time.

For instance here is one of the many examples you’ll find in this book.
If it had not been for his terrible misfortune, we likely never even would have known John existed:

“On a Sunday in June 1356 John Waryn went to watch an archery contest at Brune in Lincolnshire, that was being held on the church green and was killed by a stray arrow.”

Anyway, I’m just going through the book and share some of the bits I find most interesting.
One thing to also keep in mind is that the book is, as the title mentioned, about Medieval England.
So although much of what we’ll read would also match what things were like in other Medieval cities, some would also have been very different there.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…:

“The streets could be very wide, quite a different picture than we experience in medieval cities. In the clay areas of the Midlands some sunken roadways were over forty feet wide and five feet deep. Road surfaces themselves were twenty feet wide and were drained by ditches on either side. Ditches could be as much as eight feet wide and three feet deep. Complaints about the condition of the highways and streets were frequent in all court records. The potholes were so large that a cart hitting one could overturn and spill out both driver and load.”

A common misconception about the middle ages is that people shared their living spaces with cattle.
You can read more about why that is mostly a myth here:
https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2025/11/15/did-medieval-people-share-their-homes-with-cattle/

But this nice illustration shows what peasant houses would have been like and explains that the cattle often had their own space:

A good description of what these houses would be like from the inside and wonderful confirmation that we have no evidence of these places being filthy, but we have some that suggests the opposite:

“The floors were usually of clay, although some stone, cobbles, and stone flags have been found. Wooden floors were very rare. On some house sites floors showed considerable wear. In clayland areas often the only visible remains of a house is a U-shaped depression formed by the sweeping of tidy housewives. In other sites wear from heavy traffic, such as in doorways, forced owners to repair them with cobbles and stones. In general, house sites are very clean, indicating that peasants did not live in filthy hovels but regularly swept them out and threw the rubbish in the close. Thus no well stratified layers of deposits on the floors remain to help date houses or locate house sites. The peasants also took measures to keep the floors dry.”

What the straw covered floors mentioned in the next quote looked like is still hotly debated by historians, well, especially by me.
I believe that they didn’t just throw random loose straw (rushes) all over the place but usually wove them together, roughly or neatly, or packed bundles close together.
But I’ll write about that in another article some day.
Either way, straw does catch fire easily.
I do have to disagree with the claim that chickens & pigs were allowed to wander freely in houses.
We know they sometimes did, but I’m yet to find convincing evidence that suggests that they were allowed to do so.
I mean, how do we know for sure that these cases of where animals caused havoc indoors they had let themselves in?
We know from the records that pigs were known to cause severe damage and literally killed children, which makes it hard to believe they would have just been allowed to walk in and out of the house.
More about medieval pigs here:
https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2024/08/05/book-review-the-medieval-pig-by-dolly-jorgensen/

“Coroners’ roll cases indicate that floors were covered with straw. For instance, when Alice Saddler left the house on an errand, in closing the door she created a draft that spread the fire from the hearth to the straw on the floor and burnt down the house. Or consider the case of the fifty-year-old chaplain, John of Norfolk, who went to bed on a Friday night and placed his candle on the partition above his head. He fell asleep without blowing out his candle and it fell on the straw on the floor and burnt down the rectory.23 Straw on the floor must have absorbed dirt brought in on shoes and droppings of chickens and pigs who were allowed to wander freely in houses, as well as giving the house a general air of coziness. When the straw was dirty, the housewife swept it out and put down new straw.”

For instance, in this case nobody assumes the bear was allowed to wander freely:

“In the middle of the night of Thursday after the feast of St. John at Latin Gate 42 Edward III a bear of Robert Cotiller broke its chain and broke through the wall of the chamber in which it was kept in the cellar of Thomas Stoke’s inn. It left the chamber and climbed the stairs to a high room where Emma daughter of Edward Putton, 7 years old, lay sleeping in her bed. It entered her room and mauled her”

A nice mention of people having their own well/pit in the yard or place behind their home, people often assume that hygiene suffered because it was such a hassle to go get water from far away for everything, but wells and fountains were really quite common and relatively close by:

“The close might also contain a well or a pit to collect runoff water. There were, of course, pubic wells, and 2 percent of all recorded accidents happened in them. But many closes had private wells, as both archaeological and record evidence indicate. Three percent of all accidents occurred in the family’s well, while 1 percent occurred in a neighbor’s well. People without wells probably used a neighbor’s well as frequently as they went to the village well, which might have been a longer walk.”

More evidence of people having access to clean water that they used for more than just drinking:

“Pits, or open cisterns, were also a common feature of closes. Like wells they served as a source of water for cooking and drinking; but they were also used for bathing, washing clothes, and watering animals.”

I love it when the evidence shows that medieval people weren’t the mucky filthy weirdos that we’re still often told they were.
Mind you, the medieval family had very little waste, food & other biological waste ended up on a heap in the yard, everything else was recycled, this included bones, broken pottery, etc:

“In general, the excavated toft sites have been remarkably clean, and archaeological evidence does not indicate what was done with rubbish. The houses were swept out, probably into the immediate area, but there is very little broken pottery on the sites nor is it obvious that it was spread over the fields. Not even the old quarries at Wharram Percy appear to have been used for rubbish”

The following seems to clash with what the book just mentioned and what we know from other, more recent books but these were complaints, so we’re reading about cases where someone dumped their waste in the wrong spot and were ordered to move it.
Also free bonus horrific murder story that to me suggests that these dung heaps outside doors may not have been what they sound like.
I mean would you drag a body to a heap outside your front door on a public street?
Or was this particular dungheap perhaps by the backdoor?

“Complaints in manorial courts about dung heaps obstructing village streets suggest that each house had one by its door. Coroners’ inquests provide further corroboration. One case mentions a dunghill in the street outside a residence, and several cases involved people carting dung into fields. One brutal homicide also featured a dung heap. A husband and his children murdered their stepmother, cut her up, and buried her in a dung heap outside their door”

I love what these records of thefts tell us about the past, how things that to us modern people don’t sound like they’d be very valuable, were so for medieval people.
Of course everything then was handmade and a lot more expensive than today:

“We know about ephemeral and valuable possessions from court records. Valuable goods stolen from houses included mazers (drinking bowls usually made of maple), tablecloths and sheets, brass pans and pots, silver spoons, pieces of jewelry, and money. In all, 2 percent of the thefts appearing in jail delivery rolls included household goods; 5 percent, clothing; and 17 percent, valuables. Cloth, often stored in houses, accounted for 15 percent of thefts.”

But the records also give us an idea of how little poor people owned, also that lord was a bastard:

“Manorial court records describe people with appallingly little, particularly in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. On Chalgrave manor in 1279 a bondsman and vagrant, who had no tenement or dwelling place, could no longer hold body and soul together. In dying he directed that his surcoat be given to the Church and a cow, his only other possession, be given to his sister, who was a leper. The lord countermanded this last act of familial charity and took the cow as heriot.”

I also love how these records can be combined with other sources to give us a better idea of how homes were decorated, I especially like the details about how there was always a fire burning and liquids warming there, people sometimes think medieval people didn’t bathe/wash much because warming water would be such a chore.
But it seems like they almost always had warm water ready:

“Combining information from archaeology, principalia, court cases, and coroners’ inquests, we can construct the interior of a rudimentary cottage. With additions to this picture, we can also imagine the inside of a wealthier peasant’s house. In a one-bay cottage the hearth would be in the center of the floor, raised up so that the straw on the floor would not easily catch fire. There would be a trivet and an earthen pot on it and perhaps a brass pot with feet. The coroners’ inquests indicate that a fire was kept going all the time and that liquids were always warming there: milk, water, wort, porridge, and so on. The cooking qualities of the fire were never wasted, there was always a pot-au-feu. The hearth might also have a spit and a clay canopy to channel the smoke. Various bowls, jugs, buckets, and wooden spoons and forks were by the fire or in cupboards and hutches. A trestle table would certainly be part of the furnishings. These were convenient, for they could be taken down at night to make room for people to sleep on the floor and could be carried outside to work or eat on in good weather.”

Although medieval people likely didn’t smell much (they washed, used soap & were terrified of bad smells), the book reminds us that the main smell you’d notice if you would go back with your time machine, was the smell of smoke:

“Clothing, bedding, and people would have smelled of smoke the year around. Perhaps the smell was a welcome disguise for those originating from sweat and close contact with domestic animals.”

Casually debunking the idea of the medieval diet being bland and not nutritious:

“A survey of the diet suggests that it was a healthy one and might even appeal to a modern health columnist with its whole grains, a balance of fresh fruits and vegetables, and, though probably not in great quantities, some meat, cheese and fish. The evidence from skeletal remains indicates that the peasants were fairly robust. At Wharram Percy the mean stature was 5 feet 5 inches, larger than previously thought.”

The following makes sense, after all the medieval diet contained no/little refined sugar/starch/carbohydrates/tobacco/caffeine:

“Of the teeth examined, dental caries afflicted 8.1 percent, less than modern Britain but more than Anglo-Saxon Britain.”

Does this fit your idea of what kind of food would be given to the poor:

“Hospital records also preserve the amounts of food distributed to the poor, who stopped for a meal, and served
to permanent pensioners. At one of the most luxurious establishments, Sherburn hospital, each person received a loaf of bread and a gallon of beer daily, meat three times a week, and eggs, cheese and herrings on the other days. These were in addition to butter, vegetables, and salt”

Hahaha, I love this story and totally deny having been in a similar situation:

“One popular carol spoke of women going to the tavern during the day and bringing along meat and fish. When they went home they told their husbands that they had been at church, but they fell asleep immediately”

These records show us that peasants also cared about having clean hands and tables while eating, that they kept their hands clean:

“The principalia included tablecloths and goods stolen from peasant houses often included napkins, towels, and tablecloths. People ate with their fingers for the most part and used knives, which they always carried with them, to cut cheese, meat, and bread. Spoons were used for soups and porridge”

Excellent piece on medieval hygiene but the bald part needs a note.
These days we believe that most bathhouses were not used for prostitution, unfortunately medieval records sometimes used the same word for bathhouses & brothels: namely stews.
But we know that in many prostitutes were not welcome and that they were used by families, that you’d meet your neighbours there, that they weren’t really suitable for naughty games.
Read more about that in my review of Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities’ by Carole Rawcliffe (2013), ‘Het middeleeuwse openbare badhuis’ by Fabiola van Dam (2020), and ‘Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries’ by Janna Coomans (2021):

“By our standards the peasants would undoubtedly have been offensively malodorous, but it is all too easy to be overrefined in this matter. The ordinary smells associated with living in a smoky house, working around animals, and sweating from hard labor might offend our sensibilities, but they are common to farm work. It is only the accumulation of these odors on unwashed clothes and bodies that could lead to a certain ripeness of smell. Even so, toleration of odor is a matter for the people who lived with it and not a question of judgment for a historian, who does not have to sleep with a peasant man or woman. But because we are curious about the material environment, bathing is a relevant area of inquiry. Needless to say, such intimate detail is difficult to find even for the English kings, although we know that King John, whatever his other deficiences, had more entries in household accounts for hot baths than other kings.”‘ Romances and illustrations accompanying the texts indicate that baths were part of erotic encounters and tubs were kept in bedchambers. Indeed, prostitution took place in the bathhouses in medieval Europe. But all of this does not tell us about peasants and their baths.”

More fascinating details regarding hygiene, people were literally risking their lives bathing, washed their hands, from the recent books I just mentioned we get the idea that a weekly visit to the bathhouse was pretty common:

‘The coroners’ inquests report on thirty-five people whose baths ended tragically by drowning. The case contents rather than the number of cases will, of course, be more informative. First, most of the cases occurred when the weather was warm, and most involved bathing in streams, pits, and rivers. For instance, after a twenty-six-year-old harvest worker bathed himself in a stream on a Tuesday in August 1362, he was dancing around to dry himself and fell in and drowned. Boys watching sheep on hot days took off their clothes to bathe and cool off. Other cases specifically mention people washing their hands before or after eating. A ten-year-old boy was sitting and eating on a market stall. When he finished, he went to wash his bowl and hands and fell into a trough. Another man went to bathe at vespers and drowned in the river because he did not know how deep it was. In winter, basins or tubs of hot water served for bathing. In February 1349 a woman was sitting in her house by the fire heating water for a bath. Her fifteen-day-old baby was near her in a cradle. The tripod broke and the boiling water scalded the baby.” As these examples show, people enjoyed a bath and casually washed their dirty hands or bathed away the sweat of hot labor. What they do not show is how frequently they bathed.“

A bit on how old people were when they got married, a lot of folks today still believe that child marriage was common in Medieval Europe and that people at least married young, but in much of Europe this was not the case.
I’ll write more about that in a different article.
But this here shows that in an extreme situation, the age of marriage still didn’t go lower than late teens:

“In the early fourteenth century, when land was hard to come by and wages were depressed, couples married in their early twenties. With the new economic opportunities opening up following the Black Death, the marriage age for women and
men dipped into the late teens”

“We have been suggesting that medieval peasant youth married young, but none of our sources so far have given ages. The absence of concrete evidence places greater value on the more subtle indicators of cultural attitudes toward the age at which marriage and sexual relations were considered appropriate. We must, therefore, look at unorthodox sources to determine what the society thought was the normal age of first marriage. All evidence points to the mid-teenage years as being too young for adult responsibilities, including marriage. The poll tax itself did not tax youth of fourteen because they were not fully adult. In the prosecution of rape cases, jurors singled out as especially reprehensible those men whose victims were teenagers and were much more likely to convict such offenders.”

“Another legal indication that adult marriages were preferred was the continued custom of keeping the age of majority for inheritance at twenty-one and higher. Such a high inheritance age was a signal, if not always an impediment, to youth to delay marriage. While these bits of evidence from legal records are far from conclusive, they do indicate that early and middle teenage marriages, and perhaps even sexual contacts, were not the norm.”

Let’s raise a glass to this brave dad:

“One father lost his life trying to save his teenage daughter from a rapist. She had gone to the woods to gather sticks when the rapist approached her carrying a bow and arrow. She called for help from her father, who came to her rescue but was shot.30 The rape and attempted-rape cases indicate a feeling on the part of society that girls in their teenage years should be sheltered from sexual encounter and that violent sexual attacks on them were repugnant.”

This story got to me, so I had to check Hanawalt’s other book (Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348) for more details:

“After nones on 24 May 1270 Emma daughter of Richard Toky of Southill went to “Houleden” in Southill to gather wood. Walter Gargolf of Stanford came, carrying a bow and a small sheaf of arrows, took hold of Emma and tried to throw her to the ground and deflower her, but she immediately shouted and her father came. Walter immediately shot an arrow at him, striking him on the right side of the forehead and giving him a mortal wound. He struck him again with another arrow under the right side so into the stomach. Seman of Southill immediately came and asked him why he wished to kill Richard, and Walter immediately shot an arrow at him, striking him in the back so that his life was despaired of. Walter then immediately fled.”

Praise be to Richard and I hope Walter is spending eternity in hell.

Anyway, does what you’ve just read fit what you’ve been told about how women were treated, valued and protected in Medieval Europe?

But what about the canon law that allowed marriage at a young age?

“But the canon law, applicable to all Europe and not England alone, permitted a very young age for marriage contracts. Children under seven could not enter into marriage contracts, and those over that age could repudiate the agreement at the age of puberty. For boys puberty was canonically established at age fourteen and for girls it was twelve. Few cases appeared in ecclesiastical courts arguing for dissolution of marriage or contract on the grounds of the parties being too young. The situation may seldom have arisen because children so young contracted few marriages or their repudiation was accepted without a court case.”

I like how Hanawalt here explains that things were different in Italy by using the famous story of Romeo and Juliet:

“Cultural evidence suggests that marriage of teenagers was not normal and that a young Romeo and Juliet marrying in England would have created scandal. Furthermore, the great age disparities between husband and wife found in Italy were not the norm in England. In evaluating the evidence of age at first marriage and percentage marrying, it would appear that Hajnal was correct in suggesting that in medieval England the age of marriage was lower than in the modern period and a greater proportion of the population married. But his thesis requires some modification to take into account the fact that age of marriage could vary with economic and social conditions and that it was never common to marry in the early or middle teens.”

So how many babies did people actually have?
We know that people had access to birth control, but how common this was is difficult to say:

“In the absence of baptismal records, it is very difficult to determine if peasants were performing some sort of birth control, including infanticide. The drop in the number of people per household in the late thirteenth century has been taken as a sign of some artificial control over reproduction.”‘ Scattered cases in the coroners’ inquests, when, for instance, all of the children of one family died at once, tell us something about spacing of children. Robert Penlyn of Hemingby and his wife, Alice, went to market on a Saturday in December 1355, leaving at home their three children, John, aged four, Agnes, two, and Edmund, one.48 Even with such information it is difficult to tell if the two-year gap between John and Agnes was the product of family planning or if the conception in between, assuming there was one, was terminated naturally.”

The image we have of large families with lots of kids being common is something we see more later, but during the middle ages:

“The household size was small, possibly dipping very low (2.5) for poorer peasants in the land hunger of the early fourteenth century and never averaging more than 5. Even in the century following the Black Death, when land and wages were abundant, household size remained small and population stagnated at a very low level in spite of the new economic opportunities.”

We often hear that there were strict laws about “hunting & gathering” because the land belonged to the lords, but learning that they weren’t always hanged on the spot but fined and that the fines were very low gives that a whole different perspective, not that some were not punished severely, but still:

“Collecting nuts and fruit or taking brush from the lord’s hedgerows or forest were offenses punishable by fine. Fines were often so low that, even if caught, it was still profitable to gather. For instance, stealing a whole cartload of brush and firewood brought a fine of only 6d. in Wakefield. Fines were also imposed on hunting and keeping hunting dogs, and peasants caught with venison, rabbits, and squirrels paid heavily for their illicit protein. A Wakefield woman spent three weeks in prison for a dead hare found in her yard, as did a man for taking a rabbit from the field. Killing a deer cost 20s. Even access to some fishing remained in the lord’s preserve.”

And the book keeps giving us these amazing but sometimes horrible little dramas, goodness me, what a horrible accident:

“During a break from work on August 29, 1368, John, son of John Gallerer, and Edith Fohester were sleeping in a field at Wynneslegh and he had a scythe under his belt. When Edith woke up, she cut her arm against John’s scythe and bled to death.’

One of the illustrations from the book, it comes from my favourite medieval book, the Lutrell psalter, Hanawalt used it to explain that both men and women worked to bring in the harvest:

In some parts of Europe daughters & sons got equal inheritance, like in the low countries.
You can read more about that here; Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities’ by Carole Rawcliffe (2013).
But this was very uncommon, in England she didn’t always get the same, but still something;

“Even if the daughter was not the chief heir, she could claim some part of the family wealth, usually payable in animals, grain, household goods or money. These inheritances might have been in addition to an earlier dowry or they might be a provision for it. Only 9 percent of the wills specifically mention that the bequest to a woman was for her marriage.”

Another example of how looking at records like these give another insight into the reality of daily life:

“5.9 percent of the women victims drowned in a public well compared to 1.6 percent of the men”

“The time of accident was given very roughly in the inquests, but nonetheless a definite pattern of greater and lesser risks for men and women appears as they pursued their daily routines. Both rose at dawn, but women had only 4.2 percent of their accidents then, compared to 9.8 percent for men. The morning work was more risky for women, with 15.6 percent of their fatal accidents occurring at that time, compared to 9.8 percent of the men’s. Noon was high-risk for both, as they tired of their labor and became hungry: 20.8 percent of the women’s fatal accidents occurred then and 17.7 percent of men’s. Women might have had a slightly higher number of accidents because they were involved with cooking at noon. For both sexes afternoon represented a lull in activities leading to fatal accidents (4.2 percent of female deaths and 7.5 percent of male deaths, and may indicate a postprandial nap. But evening saw another increase (15.6 and 18.9 percent for females and males, respectively). Night was truly hazardous for both sexes at 39.6 percent for women and 33.9 percent for men.”

This is fascinating, Hanawalt describes how our perspective can sometimes be influenced by what we know of an other era;

“Women’s work in peasant households has been largely misrepresented by modern historians who tend to equate peasant women with pioneer women. Medieval peasant women did not spend much of their time producing from scratch the basic necessities for their families. Instead, most households availed themselves of specialists in weaving, tailoring, and even brewing and baking. A second misconception that must not be allowed to stand is that women’s work involved fewer hours than men’s or that, because women had fewer accidents, their work was not as strenuous.”

I’ve portrayed the life of a medieval woman in an open air museum in the Netherlands where I literally had my own house to look after.
And I must admit that every time I waste a day cleaning the damn white tiled floor in my house, I think back to when I just had to brush a dirt floor in the middle ages.
It was so much less work.
I’ve already shared my doubts about animals being allowed to walk in and out, but I love that we have literal evidence of floors being swept:

“Cleaning house occupied very little of a woman’s time. As we observed in Part I, the houses were small and furniture rudimentary and the peasants owned few pans and dishes. The floors were covered with straw, and chickens, pigs, cats, and dogs wandered in and out at will. But the primitive nature of housing should not lead one to conclude that the housewives were slovenly and cared nothing about cleanliness. As archaeological evidence has shown, floors were swept frequently enough that the brooms left U-shaped depressions on house sites.“

“Of the 237 women whose activity at the time of death is specified, the cause of death of 37 percent of them related directly to work around the house. The most dangerous task was drawing water from wells and pits (17 percent). The water was for cooking, washing, and drinking. Either the housewife or the children got water for the household. Doing the laundry was also a dangerous activity, with 3 percent of the women either drowning or being scalded. The earth around wells, ponds, and ditches became treacherously slippery with water splashed on them, so that it was easy to slip in. Thus one woman washing linen cloth by a ditch in December 1348 slid into the water and drowned. Other accidents involving work related to maintaining the house included cutting wood, baking, cooking, taking grain to the mill, and general housework.”

A bit on how much people earned… look at that, men & women being paid for the same work, what a novel idea, we could learn from that…

“For instance, a thatcher received 2d. a day in the thirteenth century, but his female assistant received only 1d. Her work was gathering the stubble and handing it up to him while he did the more skilled labor. In general, manors hired female laborers and boys for such unskilled agrarian tasks, and consequently their pay was low. The work of picking over seed grain, however, was a highly skilled occupation in which women excelled and, therefore, tended to be paid more. When men and women did the same work, they received equal pay.“

More about how women made a living, yes they didn’t just stayed home to look after the kids, women not working is quite a recent thing in history.
Also I love getting to know Mabel, the tree thief:

“The village credit and land market as well as fairs and regional markets attracted women. A variety of sources show women aggressively engaged in market activities. For instance, Mabel the Merchant was charged in 1294 in Chalgrave court with taking ash trees. Women made loans to other villagers that are recorded in the court rolls. And there is even a case in the coroners’ inquests of a woman who went out to negotiate a debt, leaving her nine-month-old baby alone in the house, so that it died of a fire in its cradle”

Medieval women were not the powerless domestic slaves they’re often portrayed as, they had more rights and opportunities than women have in some countries today:

“Since women could inherit property and buy it as well, they played a fairly active role in the village land market even after marriage. Married women sometimes sold land they had brought with them to the marriage to help the family through a difficult time, or they might buy or inherit land that would eventually go to a child’s marriage portion.”

What? No clubbing & drinking?
Then why bother?!!

“The moralist writing ‘How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter’ recommended that women not gad about the town or get drunk on the money they made from selling cloth, thereby implying that they had control over their butter and eggs money.”

More evidence of women having rights and having those protected by the court:

“The law protected women’s rights to their dowry and lands they inherited from their family, so that a husband could not legally demise it without the wife’s permission. But more than one woman came into court complaining that she had not been consulted about the sale of land, because she feared to cross her husband. Joan, wife of Hugh Forester, was typical. She demanded and won the rights to one and a half acres that her husband demised without her permission because she was “not able to gainsay it in his lifetime.”

These records are so interesting but also so terrible and heartbreaking:

“By four and five work appears in children’s accidental-death pattern. They were often assigned to baby-sit and go for water. For instance, a one-year-old boy was left in care of his five-year-old brother, but because the older boy was such a poor custodian, the inquest says, the cradle caught fire. Even if children of four and older were simply sitting and observing their parents work, they were beginning to learn some tasks such as cooking, brewing, milking, and digging.'”

But these horrible accidents give us an insight into the kind of jobs sons & daughters had to do from real life examples in stead of adults writing about how you should raise your kids:

“During the years six through twelve, children began to have real chores around the house, aiding both their parents in work and contributing to the supplemental income of the household through fishing and gathering food (6 percent of their fatal accidents involved such activities). From five to twelve fishing was a common pastime for boys. Those who lived by the coast searched for shellfish and those who lived near ponds, rivers, and streams, fished for eels and freshwater fish. William, son of Nicholas Baly of Spalding, aged twelve, was collecting cockles on the coast at Multon in March 1357 when a wave caught him and washed him out to sea. One five-year-old boy was looking for eels in the Humber and drowned. And in July 1348 two boys, one twelve and the other eight, went to a pile dam on the river in Cambridgeshire and fell in.”

Poor little John, what a horrific scene, a death you’d expect in a Charles Dickens novel, but real:

“John Wayhe, aged twelve, was a swineherd on a manor. He was so cold one morning in December 1348 that he went into the manor’s bakery and climbed into one of the huge ovens to keep warm and burned to death.”

Girls worked hard, I bet medieval girls had better abs and biceps than quite a few modern day gym-bros….

“Girls from six to twelve also began to contribute to the household economy. They did much of the fruit picking, and nut, herb, and wood gathering. They picked apples, pears, and cherries in the closes or in the wilds. They also collected shellfish along the coast. Such activites resulted in 5 percent of their fatal accidents. Much of their work, however, aided their mothers in their daily work routine. They fetched the water, built fires, and helped with the cooking. Drawing water accounted for 32 percent of their fatal accidents, and cooking, laundry, and so on accounted for 14 percent.”

Yes, until not that long ago historians thought that medieval kids didn’t really have a childhood and were just treated like small adults.
That perspective has changed, in part due to records like these:

“The high number of accidents in the home is important for two reasons. First, contrary to Aries’s claim that teenagers behaved like adults in the Middle Ages, their accident pattern shows similarities to those of both children and adults. They still lived and worked around the house and spent time fishing and gathering rather than following the pattern of their fathers in working primarily in the fields or at a craft. Second, the large percentage of those involved in accidents in the home suggests that teenagers did not routinely live in another person’s house as servants.”

“While play and personal activities still occupied much of a girl’s life from age six to twelve, she was also increasingly doing tasks about the home. From the ages of thirteen to nineteen their accidental-death pattern closely resembled that of the adult female. Most of their accidents involved household tasks, walking or other transport, supplemental economic activities, and some agricultural work. The places of death also show an essential similarity. Teenage girls went for water and wood and would often be left in charge of cooking.”

Dear gods, is there no end to these terrible stories?
Poor poor William, his poor mum:

“William, son of Herbert atte Still, aged ten, was standing in the prior of Newnham’s kitchen cutting up vegetables with a knife. The knife dropped, cutting a tendon of his foot. His mother, who was nearby and probably also a servant, carried him to their house, but he died of the bleeding.”

More details about the lives of women:

“Young women learned brewing and a variety of other tasks at home from their mothers or in service. A housemaid’s lament indicates the work:

I must serve the old women, I must learn to spin, to reke, to card, to knit, to wash buckes, and by hande, to brew, bake, make mault, reap, bind sheaves, weed in the garden, milke, serve hoggs, make cleane their houses, within doores make beddes, sweep filthy houses, rubbe dirty ragges, beat out old Coverlettes, draw up old holes: Then to the kitchen, turne the spit, although it was but seldome, for we did not at meat often; then scour pottes, wash dishes, fetch in wood, make a fire, scalde milk Pannes, wash the Charne and butter dishes, ring out a Cheese clote, set everything in good order.”

It was indeed quite common for children/teenagers worked away from home, but not just work, these were also apprenticeships, this too explains why in Europe people didn’t get married later:

“…studies of early-modern sources have indicated that young peasants ten to twelve years of age were sent to other people’s houses to work until they were in their twenties, when they would marry.”

Average life expectancy was low in Medieval Europe, average being the key word.
But this is of course a skewed perspective because the number was low due to high child mortality.
However, it was not just childhood diseases that killed so many children:

“Of the fifty-eight children under one year of age appearing in the coroners’ inquests, 33 percent died in fires in their cradles.”

As someone who owns chickens, I still doubt that these fires were caught by chickens who just wandered in and out of houses.
I think they walked in when someone wasn’t paying attention and left a door open.
I just find it hard to imagine that people who cared about sweeping their floors wouldn’t mind chickens coming in and making a mess.
Not to mention that they like scratching the ground, turning your carefully compacted, stamped floor into rubble:

“These fires are frequently described as being caused by chickens. Chickens pecked about the open hearth for food and either picked up a burning straw or twig and dropped it into the cradle or perhaps their feathers caught fire and they flailed around, setting the cradle or house afire.”

Another lovely illustration from the book showing an intimate but familiar daily scene, mum cooking with a baby on her lap and another kid helping out:

Poor poor family:

“William Senenok and his wife went to church on Christmas Day 1345, leaving their infant daughter, Lucy, in a cradle and
in the care of their daughter Agnes, who was three. Agnes went out into the courtyard to play and the younger child burned.”

Before you ask, yes medieval people were shocked by these stories too and didn’t approve:

“As the condemnations indicate, such negligence in arranging child care was not typical. Coroners’ cases indicate that women tended each other’s children or hired women or girls to baby-sit.”

It’s still wild to me that for quite some time many historians believed that Medieval parents didn’t care as much about their children as we do, I’m glad that this perspective has practically died out.
Medieval parents loved their children:

“Parents were willing to give their lives to save their children and often expressed anger at the loss of a child through murder or negligence.
Medieval parents did not take the casual attitude toward the loss of children that historians of the modern family have ascribed to them”

Another little legal drama telling us so much about the rights women had and how young people were not considered adults till relatively late:

“Sale of land was only legal when the holder had reached
the age of majority. Thus Wakefield found that since Cecily, wife of John the Miller, was twenty-one when she sold land, the transaction was legal and her husband could not regain it.”

Arranged marriage were not as common as many people still believe and in reality how people lived together and how their relationships worked were a lot more free, in some of the other books I mentioned earlier we have examples of couples living together and even having babies without being married and this being generally tolerated:

“Not all young people, however, had marriages arranged for them. Some were from poor families who had nothing to negotiate and hence would either not marry or marry whom they pleased.”

“Evidence from the Ely bishop’s court may indicate a widespread acceptance among the populace, as well as the clergy, of a more individualistic interpretation of the rules of free consent in marriage. Thus, while historians have traditionally given parents and lords decisive influence over marriages, the cases coming before the consistory court seldom mention these authority figures but concentrate instead on the individual’s actions and decisions.”

“The majority of marriages do not fit Shorter’s dismal picture of the “Bad Old Days” in which wives were dispensable or, at best, servants to their husbands. Hufton’s work on eighteenth-century France dispels the notion that the wife’s economic contribution to the household was considered unimportant. The coroners’ inquests show medieval husband and wife sitting down at the table to eat together, and while the wife put the food on the table, she was not acting as a servant and did not stand behind her husband while he ate. Husband and wife walked side by side in fifteenth-century England, as Margery Kempe and her husband did while discussing their irreconcilable differences. Nor is marriage among the plebs as devoid of companionship as Stone describes it. The separate spheres of work in home and field and the sex-specific games did not exclude couples from a range of mutual leisure activities. A married couple was not simply an economic unit in the eyes of society, but also a social and convivial one. One cannot measure the amount of affection between spouses from medieval evidence except that court cases show an absence of malice and a strong tendency to provide and support a wife’s interests. Wills indicate a high degree of trust and even affection.”

A bit on widowhood.
It is interesting to see how in many ways becoming a widow came with quite a few opportunities and even improvements in the lives of women.
They inherited but also could take over their husbands job, sometimes literally:

“An old peasant proverb noted that the household could survive without the husbandman but not without the good wife, and most men rushed into remarriage. For widows, however, the death of the husband brought a variety of new options and new independence, both economically and emotionally, that women could not achieve in any other phase of their life cycle.”

Remember how often you’ve been told that medieval people didn’t live long?

“Although 10 percent or more of its population was over fifty”

This way of looking after the elderly is still a thing.
My dad used to tell me about a rich man who promised to look after a little old lady if he could have her big expensive house after she died, which was not a fair deal, the house was worth much more than what he was giving in return.
But the little old lady decided to live another couple of decades and outlived the man, so she had all her bills paid and still kept her house.
Mind you, in a time before governments did the decent and civilised thing and made sure all people were looked after in their old age, this is a pretty decent alternative, although not available to all of course:

“Retirement contracts are one of the most apparent of these arrangements because they appear frequently in manorial court rolls. In essence, these contracts provided that the retiring peasant would relinquish the use of his buildings and lands in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing from the person, whether a kinsman or not, who took up the contract. While wills mostly describe arrangements men made for their aging wives, manorial records are a rich source on the lot of both sexes.”

Here the details of one such contract tells us a bit about what the medieval person considered to be important in life and what these things would cost them:

“The kinsman promised Ralph that he would have a cottage and a curtilage along with, yearly, a garment valued at 2s. 6d., a pair of linen hose, a pair of shoes worth 6d., a pair of woolen hose worth 6d., four bushels of fine white wheat, and four bushels of barley.”

But these deals were not just made for individuals themselves, sometimes they were made for those they left behind, like lovely John here who made sure his widow would be taken care of:

“On his deathbed John Whytyng surrendered his messuage and land to Simon Wellyng with the provision that Simon provide John’s widow with food, drink, and sixteen bushels of barley. He also had to maintain for her use one cow, six hens, and one goose and cultivate and seed an acre of arable in every season of the year. He was to provide 3s. for clothing annually as well as a pair of shoes each Easter. She was to be allowed to continue to live in her late husband’s house, although she was only guaranteed entry, a place by the fire, and a bed.”

Poor Alice, her life must have been so difficult.
Medieval people experienced a level of poverty we can’t even imagine.
But I can’t help thinking that if she had not drowned, there may not even have been a record of her existence, we would have never heard of her;

“Alice Berdholf of Donyngton, a beggar seventy years of age, was drunk and near a well in the highway. She saw a straw and fell in the well trying to get it”

Here my review ends.

In the back of the book we find a few more interesting tables I want to share as well, these relate to the coroner’s rolls:

Table 1. Adult Males and Females: Place of Accident:

Table 2. Adult Males and Females: Activity

Table 3. Adult Males: Activity by Age

Table 8. Activities at Time of Victim’s Death: Aggregate Numbers

Fascinating stuff!

So, conclusion.
This is a great book, a masterpiece.
Even though it’s an old book, there’s very little in there that I consider to be outdated, Hanawalt did an amazing amount of research and went though an incredible amount of sources.
The result is a book that gives us a whole new and unique perspective on what life was really like back then, purely based on what medieval people themselves left for us to read.
Which is why this book in some ways was ahead of its time.
I absolutely recommend it.

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