Prof: Right.
 
Well, last time I was looking
at the vital social distinctions
that were recognized in the
sixteenth century and also how
people conceived of society as a
whole.
So today I want to come down to
the other end of the scale and
look at the most fundamental
unit of society,
the household,
the unit in which most people
spent their lives and which
governed most of their daily
activities.
 
So let's begin with some
definitions.
The household can be defined in
the first instance as being a
unit of residence,
of course, but also,
as I indicated last time,
it was a unit of authority.
It's a group of people,
some related,
some unrelated,
living under the same roof
under the authority of a
household head;
usually a man,
sometimes a widowed woman.
And in addition the household
has been described as a unit
that was 'geared for work',
the work which was necessary to
satisfy its needs as a unit of
production and of consumption
and of reproduction.
 
So all households have that
much in common but they vary
greatly in their size,
their composition,
and the complexity of the
relationships contained within
them.
 
If we go to the top of the
social scale,
the households of the nobility
and the gentry could be very
large institutions,
indeed sometimes vast
institutions.
 
They were organized to maintain
not only a noble family at an
expected level of magnificence--
and to be magnificent was one
of the qualities of a nobleman
in contemporary thought--
but also they were the centers
for administering landed
estates;
they were the centers for
conducting local government;
they were the centers often of
the exercise of political power.
 
To give just one example,
at Pontefract Castle in the--
more or less in the center of
the country in South Yorkshire,
up here--Pontefract Castle was
the home of Lord Darcy,
and a list of his household as
it was in 1521 survives.
There were eighty people in
Darcy's household--
eighty: his family,
members of his extended family
who lived with him,
his household and estate
officers.
 
He had living with him a bunch
of young men who were the sons
of his clients amongst the local
gentry and numerous menial
servants.
 
When he was called by Henry
VIII to go to war against the
Scots in 1523 he took with him
twenty-three young men who were
members of his household as his
personal guard,
wearing his livery.
 
So such people as Lord Darcy
had a style of life to maintain
which necessarily elaborated
their domestic establishments
and these were the great
households of the age.
Those of lesser people were of
course much smaller and much
less elaborate.
 
Usually, basically they were
nuclear family households--
husband, wife,
and children,
rarely co-resident relatives
living with them--
and that's a matter of some
significance.
It reflects the common cultural
assumption that every newly
married couple should set up its
own independent household and
indeed that you should not marry
until you could do so;
you should not cohabit with
your relatives.
Well, in many ways that sounds
very modern,
but one mustn't forget that a
large minority of households in
this period,
although their central core was
a nuclear family,
were also much larger than
average not because they had
kinsfolk living with them but
because they came to include
people who were linked to the
household not by blood or birth
but by contract;
servants, apprentices.
 
So if sixteenth-century
households look familiar in some
ways,
a large minority of them were
also very different and one
could say they differed from
modern households in three
essential respects.
They differed structurally in
that a substantial number of
them contained people affiliated
to the household by contract,
the servants and apprentices.
 
They differed conceptually in
that when people talked about
their family in this period they
meant not their immediate blood
relatives as we use the term.
 
They meant all members of their
household.
Servants and apprentices were
regarded as members of their
family;
they referred to them as family.
So they're different
conceptually.
And they're also different
functionally because these
people were usually taken on for
reasons which go beyond the
usual functions of a modern
household.
Whereas we tend to think of a
household as a unit of residence
and consumption,
child rearing,
and provision of emotional
support--
all of that was true in the
sixteenth century too--
but the household in the
sixteenth century also had more
extensive functions which we
don't associate with the
household today.
 
They were units of production.
 
They were farms.
 
They were workshops.
 
They were also places of
education and training where the
young were trained in particular
tasks,
and that's what I mean when I
say they were geared for work
for all this larger range of
functions.
Right.
 
Well, as working units and as
units of residence all
households were also spheres of
interdependence.
Their maintenance and their
survival depended on the
contributions of all their
members.
As we saw last time,
this was in its ideology a
patriarchal society,
of course, in the sense that
authority was conventionally
located in the persons of adult
males in general and adult male
householders in particular,
and these assumptions about the
structure of authority were also
embodied in law.
 
Remember the law of property I
mentioned last time with regard
to women.
 
But despite these constraints
of ideology and law,
women's role in the household
was of course indispensable and
this was fully recognized.
 
It was the duty of the
householder to maintain his
family by his labor,
to exercise his authority in
managing its affairs,
to play a part in training
servants and apprentices and so
forth.
The duty of the mistress of the
household was generally summed
up in a contemporary word,
"huswifery."
It's on your sheet.
 
"Huswifery"
or "housewifery."
And that comprised a range of
activity very different from the
modern notion of the housewife
or the homemaker.
It wasn't so focused on the
maintenance of the domestic
environment.
 
Housing in this period was very
simple.
Most people seem to have lived
in houses with two or three
rooms and furnishing was
exceedingly sparse.
When people died inventories of
their goods were drawn up and
from them we can learn every
single possession that they had,
and it's striking how sparse
domestic interiors were in this
period.
 
To give you one example,
a craftsman from Lincolnshire,
which is up here,
who died in 1540:
his inventory survives and he
possessed only twenty-two items
in all,
twenty-two items,
and they were items connected
with the three basics of
household life:
places to sleep,
places to sit,
and things to eat with,
horn spoons, wooden bowls;
twenty-two items in all,
not untypical.
 
So huswifery as they understood
it in the sixteenth century was
concerned not so much with
managing a domestic environment
as with managing the daily
consumption needs of the
household.
 
Food preparation of course was
central but also making and
mending clothes and bedding and
general provision for the
maintenance of the household.
 
In 1523, a man called Anthony
Fitzherbert wrote a book called
The Book of Husbandry and
in it he describes the domestic
tasks of a rural woman,
and what he describes is a
myriad of activities involving
the self-provisioning of a
household at this time:
keeping the pigs and the
poultry,
running the dairy,
growing hemp and flax,
spinning it into yarn for
making the linen for the family,
preparing the wool clip,
laboring in the fields and in
the barn when needed,
and marketing.
 
Women seem to have taken care
of most of the regular marketing
of the produce of the household:
the eggs,
the poultry,
the pigs, the grain,
and of course buying
necessities which couldn't be
produced at home.
 
In the households of urban
craftsmen and tradesmen,
things were a little
differently organized.
Women were formally excluded
from the apprenticeship which
would enable them to learn one
of these trades,
but very often they learned
many aspects of it informally
and the records reveal many
glimpses of women active in
various aspects of their
husbands' trades,
assisting their husbands as
bakers and butchers,
carrying water and sand for
husbands who were in the
building trade,
buying raw materials on their
husbands' behalf,
selling the finished goods and
so forth.
 
How do we know about things
like this?
Well, lots of records that
survive from the many courts
which governed many aspects of
local life give us little
glimpses of what people are
doing.
We know that women in one
city--well,
in Norwich actually--might be
down at the water side buying
wood for husbands who were
carpenters because on one
occasion a fight broke out and
what they were doing happens to
be described in the records.
 
You get these kinds of glimpses
of people's activities.
The wives of laboring men were
less able to participate in the
household-based production of a
craftsman's family because their
households were not productive
units.
They went out to work for
others, but you also find these
women engaged in all kinds of
wage labor to make their
contribution to the domestic
budget.
They might do seasonal
agricultural labor.
You might find them spinning
for wages, producing the yarn
for the cloth industry.
 
They took in sewing and
knitting and washing and all
kinds of other activities
outside the home.
In the city of Chester,
up here in the northwest,
for example,
at the docks they had a crane
which was operated by a
treadmill.
Someone had to stand inside a
wheel and tread it to make it
turn to make the crane operate.
 
Who was inside the wheel?
 
Women.
 
You also find many women
engaged in various forms of
petty dealing.
 
One glimpse survives of a woman
called Rose, Rose Hearst.
She lived in Maldon on the
coast of county of Essex,
and we learn that twice a week
on market day she went fifteen
miles to the county town to sell
oysters.
I hope she had a pony.
 
>
 
Carrying a basket of oysters
fifteen miles would be no joke.
But Rose Hearst sold oysters
twice a week.
So overall women's tasks
extended well beyond the
domestic sphere to include a
host of forms of
self-provisioning or
supplementary earning according
to the circumstances of
different kinds of household.
The mix would vary,
but the common characteristic
of their gender role was
flexibility and adaptability in
what was expected of them.
 
Mary Prior, who's written an
excellent article on women's
work in this period,
sums it up.
She says, "what men did
was definite,
well defined and limited.
 
What women did was everything
else."
In a way that's slightly unfair
to men.
They worked very hard too,
but it's essentially true.
Well, this constant round of
duties of huswifery were
conducted in the context of a
further role,
women's reproductive role,
which is worth dwelling on a
little.
 
Most couples in this period got
married in their mid- to late-
twenties.
 
They married relatively late
when they were ready to set up
their own household.
 
Historical demographers who
researched the parish registers,
which give us the details of
people's marriages and the
baptisms of their children and
so forth,
they've revealed that the
average woman could expect to
have her first child within
eighteen months of marriage,
and she could then expect on
average to have another child at
intervals of two to three years
for the rest of her fertile
life,
if she lived that long.
Think about it.
 
That means that the average
woman in sixteenth-century
England was pregnant for a
quarter to a third of her entire
adult life and that they were
constantly besieged by the needs
of small children.
 
These births being spaced
across an entire adult life
meant that when some children
were teenagers and ready to go
out into service others were
still toddlers and so forth--
constant demands of small
children.
So it's not surprising that,
as Thomas Tusser said in the
mid sixteenth century,
"huswives' affairs have
never none ende"--
"huswives' affairs have
never none ende"--
and despite their legal
subordination it was of course
on the performance of these
complex roles--
adapted to circumstances--that
women's standing as individuals
depended amongst their
neighbors,
within their families,
and from the performance of
these roles doubtless that they
derived their self-esteem.
 
Well, in an agriculturally
dominated,
labor-intensive,
low-productivity,
pre-mechanized and
pre-contraceptive age it could
hardly be otherwise,
and for the same reasons
children were expected to play
their part too.
Only a small minority of
children would have formal
schooling in the sixteenth
century--
it's been estimated perhaps 10%
in the early sixteenth century.
Most children would learn their
life skills practically at home
or as servants and they were
expected to begin that and to
participate in the domestic
economy as soon as they were
able to do so.
 
That may sound exploitative but
one mustn't exaggerate.
Such participation was an
essential part of their
education for life and children
tended to be introduced to tasks
at an appropriate stage.
 
There's also plenty of evidence
of them playing,
but from the age of about seven
or eight you find them regularly
engaged in tasks that they were
able to manage:
herding sheep and cows,
reaping, gathering fuel,
fetching and carrying,
picking fruit,
scaring birds in the fields,
and so on and so forth.
There's a remarkable study by
Barbara Hanawalt of Ohio State
University of children,
children's working activities
in this period which is based on
the records of coroners.
When someone died an untimely
death it had to be investigated
by the coroner just as today;
they already had that system.
And the records of coroners
which survive which deal with
the deaths of children reveal
what they were doing at the time
that they suffered an accident
leading to their death,
and so you can look at this and
you have their age and you can
see what tasks they were engaged
in.
So for example,
a little boy is helping his
father to cut down a tree when
the ax head strikes him and
sadly he's killed,
or a little girl is fetching
water when she falls down a well
and so on and so forth.
From evidence like this an
imaginative historian can
reconstruct the way in which
children were gradually
introduced in to their working
life.
Sustained, repetitive labor of
the kind we associate with
exploitative child labor was
relatively rare--
though it existed,
especially in the areas which
were heavily involved in the
cloth trade.
That's where you find children
carding wool,
spinning wool for long hours.
 
So the household in the
sixteenth century was a unit
geared for work and its members'
roles varied according to
contemporary ideas and values
regarding the proper roles of
men,
women and children.
So let's turn now to the
priorities of households and the
strategies by which they
achieved them.
Well, the first priority
obviously enough was survival.
That meant maintaining the flow
of resources on which the
household depended.
 
Today that would be your salary.
 
In the sixteenth century it
meant various combinations of
self-provisioning on one hand
and engaging in markets on the
other.
 
Most rural households were
still heavily weighted towards
providing their own basic
subsistence.
It was still essentially a
subsistence economy of small
producers relying primarily on
family labor and consuming most
of their produce in their own
houses.
Of course, that would vary
regionally and socially.
In most areas there was a
minority of those large yeoman
farmers I mentioned last time.
 
They were attuned to supplying
medium- to long-distance markets
with agricultural produce,
provisioning the towns and so
forth,
and they were producers on a
substantial scale heavily
engaged in marketing.
But it's been estimated by the
agricultural historian Mark
Overton that about 80% of
English farming in the early
sixteenth century was actually
oriented towards the subsistence
of the farm family itself and
only a small part of their
produce being marketed.
 
Well, whether the flow of
household resources depended on
self-provisioning or on selling
in the market it provided people
with their living and often
quite a bare living.
Overton, whom I mentioned,
has also calculated the incomes
that could be expected by
farmers in this period.
A big yeoman who had a hundred
acres of land growing wheat
could not only feed his family
but would probably earn,
Overton reckons,
about seventy pounds a year--
quite a substantial
income--from his production.
On the other hand,
a small husbandman with only
about ten acres would probably
have only enough left to sell to
yield him two or three pounds a
year--
so an enormous difference in
the cash income that they could
generate.
 
So for many of these families,
the smaller husbandmen,
they had a fairly narrow margin
and that was in normal times.
These estimates have to be
transformed when you get the
event of a bad harvest.
 
If the harvest failed a big
farmer,
a big yeoman farmer,
would still be able to feed his
family and prices would shoot up
because of shortages,
so he might still make a
considerable income.
But in such circumstances the
small farmer might not be able
to feed his own family;
he might fall behind on his
rent;
he might have to buy grain in
the market at inflated prices.
 
It could be a disastrous
circumstance.
And for landless wage earners
it could be even harder.
They didn't produce their own
food, they would have to buy it
at very high prices.
 
Well, bad years like that were
relatively rare but they were
unpredictable.
 
In the 1520s,
there were two very bad years
like that.
 
In the 1550s, there were three.
 
There was another run of very
bad harvests in the 1590s and so
one could go on.
 
It was one of the hazards of
life.
One can understand why people
sometimes in the diaries that
they left behind them are
looking anxiously at the weather
as the harvest approaches.
 
Other sources of insecurity
could be equally unpredictable.
The high mortality rates of the
period could pose a real threat.
The worst circumstances would
be the outbreak of an epidemic,
usually an epidemic of bubonic
plague.
When an epidemic hit a city,
as they periodically did,
you might get 20 or 30% of the
entire population dying within a
period of months.
 
The city of York,
the greatest city of the north
of England--
up here --York suffered no
fewer than seven epidemics of
bubonic plague between 1485 and
1550.
 
So this was another hazard of
life which would periodically
strike, devastating the
households that were infected.
Besides epidemics,
though, there was also the
constant threat of infectious
diseases which nowadays would be
cleared up in a matter of days
with antibiotics.
This meant that death rates
were fairly high for adults.
Very few people lived 'til
sixty, and also you have the
hazards of death in childbed for
women and of course accidental
deaths.
 
These threats could hit the
prosperous and the poor alike
and the accident of death at a
bad moment in any household
could prove absolutely
disastrous.
This was a period that had no
life insurance.
It was a period which had no
pensions for those who were left
behind.
 
Average life expectation at
birth in the sixteenth century
was actually about thirty-three.
 
That's average.
 
If you made it to twenty,
you would probably live 'til
your forties but most people
died in their forties or
fifties.
 
Okay.
 
All of these somber realities
add up to an environment of risk
for the household,
threatening its viability and
survival,
and that inevitably influenced
people's mentalities.
 
It's been suggested that people
in this period tended to value
security and stability over
change and growth.
Their economic strategies in
particular were often very
defensive, designed to minimize
risks rather than to maximize
opportunities.
 
So, their first priority was
survival.
The second major priority was
to provide for the future
well-being of the members of the
household and their future
capacity,
if they were young,
to be able to form and sustain
households of their own when
they reached the appropriate
age.
And in this process there are
three crucial moments in the
life of the household:
there's the 'putting forth' of
children into the world as they
put it;
there's marriage and the
arrangements associated with it;
and there was the transmission
of property to the new
generation through inheritance.
 
These were all aspects of the
way in which households were
gradually dispersed.
 
Let's look first at the aspect
of dispersal involving young
people,
their leaving home to enter the
households of others as servants
and as apprentices.
The institution of service was
well attuned to accommodating
the needs of different
households.
At any one point in time some
households,
often the poorer ones,
would have children who were
coming to an age at which they
were capable of a fuller working
role but there wasn't really
enough to usefully employ them
at home;
their labor wasn't needed.
Other households,
however, would require
additional labor either
temporarily because their
children were young,
too young to work,
or permanently because their
children had grown and left
home.
 
If you look at the back of your
handout you'll see a couple of
examples of sixteenth-century
households.
Now that's sixteenth-century
handwriting at the bottom.
This is from a census which was
made.
These are households of yeoman
farmers and you'll see that
there are no children in those
households but there are lots of
servants.
 
Some of them are described as
husbandmen.
They're farm workers living in
the household with these yeoman
farmers and most of them,
as you'll see,
are pretty young;
they're in their late teens or
early twenties.
 
That's what sixteenth-century
households of this particular
type would have looked like.
 
Well, the basic logic of the
system,
then, was the transfer of
children from one household to
another according to need,
but there was also more to it
than that.
 
Service was also a way in which
young people learned skills.
It was a way in which they
gained experience and of course
they earned a small wage which
they could often save.
It also served to kind of
redistribute the young across an
area from the village in which
they were born.
They would move from master to
master around the area in which
they lived,
and they would become familiar
with the economic opportunities
available to them in their
region--
gradually, when they reached
sufficient age and maturity,
getting a notion of where they
might settle permanently,
marry and set up their own
households.
 
They would often be hired
annually at the servant's hiring
fair,
and there's been a very good
study of a hiring fair done by a
woman called Ann Kussmaul who
has written an excellent book on
servants.
And she shows how you would
have a little town where the
hiring fair was and servants who
might be placed in households
scattered around the area would
come in to get hired,
and then they might be hired by
a master which would take them
out to the other side of the
particular catchment area of
this hiring fair.
 
So as year gave way to year
servants would be whizzing
backwards and forwards around
this area,
and she shows from year to year
how that happened,
and then eventually they'd
settle.
Well, a lot of this was
relevant to apprentices also,
but with the apprenticeship
system,
of course, the advantaging
mechanism and the skill training
aspect was much more prominent.
 
Families invested in the
children who went out as
apprentices.
 
They paid a fee to their
masters and they expected that
in future,
when they had finished their
apprenticeship,
they would set up as master
craftsmen themselves.
 
So service and apprenticeship
were the conventional ways of
preparing young people for the
future assumption of adult
responsibilities,
and for most of them that came
with marriage.
 
Marriage was the point at which
they were transformed into
householders and,
like leaving home,
it was a point of transition at
which individual desires and
individual ambitions had to be
reconciled with the larger
strategies of the households
they belonged to.
The making of a marriage was
quite a complex process.
It's left a lot of records and
quite a few excellent studies
have been done of it.
 
It was rarely simply a matter
of parents arranging the
marriages of the young.
 
That was certainly known.
 
Parents were more than happy to
present potential candidates to
their children and amongst the
aristocracy arrangement of
matches amongst their children
was very common.
These were families in which
marriage might have great social
and political significance and
it was too important to leave to
the young people themselves.
 
But in general young people
were permitted a considerable
degree of personal choice in
selecting their marriage
partners provided they did so by
choosing within a pool of people
who were considered acceptable;
that's to say a pool of
eligible partners of appropriate
social and economic standing.
They had an ideal of parity in
marriage;
like married like.
 
When they talk of a 'match'
they mean exactly that;
they're matching social equals.
 
And, whether the courtships
were initiated by the young
people themselves or whether
they were responding to
initiatives and suggestions
taken by their parents or their
guardians,
the successful completion of a
match was subject to what one
historian has called
"multilateral
consent."
It's not a unilateral matter
for the young people alone.
It's not a unilateral
arrangement by the parents
alone.
 
It's a matter of multilateral
consent,
that is to say the agreement
and support of all interested
parties,
notably their parents but also
their close kin,
sometimes their brothers and
sisters,
anyone who had an interest.
That could--that kind of
influence could--sometimes be
exerted quite sensitively,
but sometimes it could be
asserted quite brutally.
 
William Perkins,
the famous puritan preacher,
advised one young woman who was
worried about the marriage that
had been proposed to her by her
father.
He advised her:
"thy virginity is not all
thine to dispose of.
 
In part it is thy parents.
 
Thy father hath a stroke in it;
thy mother hath another,
and kindred a third.
 
Fight not against all,
but be his whom they would have
thee."
 
Well, in that case all that's
required of her is her consent,
but it may have been very
unwilling.
Among families that had little
or no property,
agreement, or the 'good will',
as they often put it,
of others was largely a matter
of simply moral force.
Young people from the poorer
ranks had a good deal more
freedom of movement.
 
They provided for their own
independence largely from their
own earnings and their own
savings,
and often it took them years to
do so,
but they were under less
pressure from their families.
One young woman who was
preparing for her eventual
independence was a young woman
called Isabel Fowler who died
unmarried around about 1550 and
whose goods were listed when she
died.
 
She was still a servant at the
time.
She had a chest,
and in her chest she had some
clothes and some domestic
utensils and some bedding.
Her master was holding three
pounds of accumulated wages for
her.
 
He was kind of acting as her
banker, and in addition she had
three cows which her master was
allowing her to run with his
herd.
 
So Isabel was clearly sort of
getting it together for a
potential marriage and sadly she
died;
she never made it,
but she would have been a good
catch if she had.
 
>
 
Well, amongst people with
property whether they were small
farmers or higher up the social
scale the economic arrangements
were somewhat more complicated.
 
One contemporary observer said,
"young folk be come
together for love,
but parents must cast how they
shall live."
 
Together the two families would
provide a conjugal fund.
The groom was expected--it was
expected that his family would
help to provide a dwelling and a
means of livelihood.
The bride would bring what was
called her 'portion',
her portion of goods or money
or perhaps even land with which
her family would endow her.
 
These resources would be partly
accumulated by the young people
but depended crucially at this
social level upon parental help
through either inheritance or
transfers of property,
and the sums involved could be
quite substantial.
In 1500, for example,
one study shows that the
portions which were given to
daughters of the gentry in the
county of Kent,
which is down here in the
southeast,
averaged around 280 pounds.
It was quite a lot of money in
the early sixteenth century
which these gentry families had
to find for their daughters.
Villagers in the same county,
of course, provided much lower
sums but it could range up to
twenty or thirty pounds.
But, whatever the level,
settling these matches involved
some pretty hard bargaining
amongst the families concerned.
There's a lot of evidence of
the way in which people
calculated what their families
could afford,
how the families of the bride
and groom hammered it out and
negotiated over the portions,
and all of this of course had
its implications for the younger
children in the family.
What would be left for them?
 
They had a say.
 
And they also needed to
calculate what the family could
afford if it was to remain
itself viable economically.
So it involved a lot of
strategic thinking when a
marriage was proposed,
and if all of that was
successfully resolved a match
would be concluded,
a new household would be
established and endowed.
If not, the denial of parental
support could be catastrophic
for the marriage hopes of the
young people concerned.
If these things interest you,
I recommend in particular a
book on the reading list by
Diana O'Hara,
Courtship and
Constraint.
It's a wonderful study of
sixteenth-century courtship.
Well, putting your children
forth as adolescents and then
matchmaking at the time of
marriage were also linked in
different ways to the question
of inheritance,
the way in which resources were
transferred between the
generations.
 
It's generally true to say that
sixteenth-century English
society favored primogeniture,
the lion's share going--of the
family property--
going to the eldest son.
But they also believed that an
equitable provision should be
made for younger children;
they should receive some
portion of goods to help them
into adult life.
One Tudor lawyer said that in
his view "a good and
natural loving father"
would exercise "care and
providence to advance every of
his children,
according to his ability,
with a portion of living or
substance".
 
And nor was it a matter for the
fathers alone because if they
laid down in their wills the
division of their goods amongst
their children it's also very
clear that the successful
completion of these family
strategies usually depended upon
the sustaining of the household
economy after the father's death
by their widows.
 
It was usual in people's wills
for the widow to be named
executor with full control of
the family property until either
her death or the age of majority
of the eldest son.
It was simply assumed that
these women had the experience
and the capability to do all
that was required,
and that leads us to a final
aspect of the household,
the question of authority and
power within this structure of
relationships.
 
All of the household strategies
that I've been talking about had
a certain sort of collective
element you could say,
the quality of jointness.
 
The interests of the different
individuals intersect.
You have to accommodate the
collective interest of the
household as a unit with that of
the individuals who comprised it
and had their own expectations
and perhaps ambitions.
But one might well ask whether
decision making within
households was truly collective.
 
Households, like society in
general, were organized on a
principle of hierarchical
differentiation.
People's duties and people's
entitlements were conceived of
in accordance with their place
within that hierarchy.
The household economy,
as we've seen,
involved interdependence,
it involved complementary
effort,
but the contributions of
members were not necessary of
equal weight;
they weren't necessarily of
equal value in contemporary
views.
 
One could say that in many ways
the household was,
in a sense, a sphere of
altruism in which the interests
of others were taken into
consideration,
but at the same time there
could be clashes of personality
and there could be competition
over resources.
The law and contemporary
ideology left no doubt about
where ultimate authority lay in
managing all of this.
It lay of course with the
household head.
But it's equally apparent when
one has glimpses of households
in action that the personal
dynamics of the household were
often far more complex than that
stereotype.
We have the stereotype of
uncontested patriarchal
domination.
 
The reality turns out to be far
more variegated.
The fact that women were
subordinated as a sex didn't
preclude recognition of their
competence;
it didn't preclude recognition
of their judgment.
Such qualities were expected of
them and they were daily
displayed in the conduct of
household affairs as we've seen.
Accordingly,
you find in the evidence that
wives were very often far from
being the silent spectators of
the decisions that were made
regarding their family's
well-being.
 
The evidence of matchmaking
shows that they had a very real
voice in either negotiating the
terms of the marriages of their
children or in opposing or
approving particular candidates.
The evidence we have regarding
the making of people's wills
shows that women were often
heavily involved,
advising their husbands on the
terms of their wills and
sometimes indeed disputing them.
 
They were the ones who would
ultimately have to administer
and execute those wills and they
had a voice in their making.
And they appear elsewhere
making their voices heard and
indeed being listened to.
 
Outside the context of the
household most women could of
course exercise little public
authority,
but within it they clearly had
a recognized role and that
recognized role conferred
certain rights and certain
entitlements.
 
Anthony Fitzherbert in The
Book of Husbandry advised
that both wife and husband
should from time to time make
what he called
"reckonings"
with one another.
 
He was thinking of their
economic activities,
that they should make
reckonings of their activities
with one another,
and he went on:
"for if one of them should
use to deceive the other he
deceiveth himself and is not
likely to thrive,
and therefore they must be true
eyther to other."
That's just one statement of an
ideal of mutuality within
marriage,
within the management of the
household,
which of course found its
immediate expression every day
in the day-to-day activities of
households.
 
That certainly didn't transform
them into spheres of equality of
course.
 
But it could and did involve
the development of working
relationships of mutual support
and mutual respect in the
pursuit of priorities that were
essentially shared.
So, in short,
the household was certainly a
sphere of power,
it was certainly a sphere of
authority,
but it was one in which their
exercise was also constantly
influenced by the play of the
individual personalities of
those involved.
And I think if one wants to
work on this kind of problem one
needs to be sensitive to the
balance between these various
elements.
 
So, to conclude,
society and economy in the
early modern period has been
described by one historian,
David Rollison,
as a "culture of
households in a landscape."
 
The household was certainly
fundamental and it was
fundamental to both continuity
and change in the social history
of the period.
 
A lot of the characteristics
that I've been describing
endured throughout the whole of
the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries,
but some aspects of household
life did change.
 
They changed with changing
circumstances.
Some of the changes which took
place in this period in a
variety of spheres--
in economy, in population,
in social structure,
in culture--had their influence
upon household relationships.
 
Some of them threatened the
viability of household
economies, some aspects of
economic and population change
for example.
 
Some changes provided new
opportunities,
new opportunities for the
consumption of household goods,
new opportunities for the
education of children and other
things which we'll see in due
course in later lectures.
In general, one could also say
that the course of change in
this period and the outcomes of
change crucially involved the
responses to changing
circumstances of thousands of
households,
and all of their members had a
hand in those responses.
 
It was never just a matter of
impersonal social forces acting
upon households.
 
Individuals and families made
their decisions,
adapted their strategies in
accordance with their values,
in accordance with their
priorities in meeting the
various changes of the period,
and thinking about it that way
is helpful,
I think, because when we think
about it that way we can give
some of the abstractions and
generalizations about the great
processes that took place in the
early modern period something of
a human face at the level of the
household,
and in many ways it's the
capacity of historians to
recapture the shifting
expressions on those faces which
makes these things worth
studying.
 
Okay.
 
Well, next time I'll go on to
look at various kinds of
communities and their
institutions and patterns of
relationships.
 
 
 
