The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (10 page)

The results of this inadequate understanding of female sexuality, together with biblical, legal, and intellectual prejudices against women, are profound. Galen teaches that women must have an orgasm in order to conceive a child. That is all well and good for those women whose husbands will toil long and hard to help them conceive, but for those who come into contact with the mass of young men traveling around the country, it is dangerous. The implication is that if a man wants to seduce a woman, and rapes her so brutally that she derives no physical pleasure from the experience, she should not conceive. There is a specific statute making rape a crime, and it is taken seriously enough to be deemed one of the crimes which can only be dealt with by the king’s justices (rather than in the local courts), but it is very difficult to apply. If the woman fails to conceive, and there is no other evidence that sex took place with the accused, it is unlikely that the perpetrator will be held to account: any trial would be just her word against his. On the other hand, if the woman
does
conceive, then she is deemed to have physically enjoyed the experience (according to Galen’s teaching) and so legally no rape has taken place.

These difficulties are compounded by the social hierarchy of men. If the perpetrator of a rape is a high-status individual, it is very difficult for anyone to proceed against him. If a summoner tries to take action against a man of rank, he will incur the man’s enmity as well as the embarrassment of accusing someone, on the dubious strength of a woman’s slander. When a royal tax collector starts sexually molesting girls and young women on a systematic basis in 1381, his actions help trigger the Peasants’ Revolt. Unlawful violence is practically the only form of revenge open to the outraged fathers.

The foregoing makes the woman’s lot seem a particularly harsh one. However, there are some great advantages to being a woman. When the king issues writs to his sheriffs summoning an army, it is the men who have to risk their lives and fight, not the women. Despite this, high-status women are still entitled to all the benefits of being connected to “those who fight.” They can inherit land in their own right, even when ownership entails providing military service.

High-status women also share the power of their husband’s position and rank. Many widows are only too pleased for people to associate them with their late husbands—after all, how many dowager countesses want people to forget that they were once married to an earl? This can apply farther down the social spectrum. A villein’s wife is a co-tenant of the manor along with her husband and valuable in her own right. Women in cities are able to carry on their husband’s trade after his death. So a woman married to a tailor may become an independent tailor herself, or a practitioner of any one of more than a hundred trades—even an armorer or a merchant. Margaret Russell of Coventry is a prime example of an exceedingly wealthy provincial female trader. Just one of her ventures to Spain consists of goods worth £800. When women have this sort of capital, and are managing international trading ventures from Coventry, you can hardly look upon them as downtrodden. Nor should you forget that the second richest person in all of fourteenth-century England is a woman—Queen Isabella. The fact that a wife is legally subordinate to her husband is of relatively little consequence when she is socially superior to everyone else.

Another point to remember is that this discrimination against women is only legal, it is not personal. If a wife is spirited enough, she may do more than hold her own against her husband, as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath will gladly relate. While a man may legally beat his wife, she may accuse him in a church court of cruelty, for beating her too much, and have the court force him to mend his ways.
²³
. But no man could take his wife to court for this—for husband beating—as no court will sympathize with a man so feeble that he cannot defend himself against his own wife. Similarly, if a man wants to take legal action against his wife for adultery, he has to admit he is a cuckold, and in so doing he may make himself appear ridiculous. If a husband and wife turn to crime—and many families do engage in criminal activity together—and if they commit a hanging offense, only the husband hangs. His wife simply has to plead that she was obeying her husband’s orders. Through such technicalities, the apparent gross inequalities of the law appear more extreme on parchment than in the majority of people’s daily lives. As the Wife of Bath puts it, ‘Any wife who knows what’s what, can make her husband think that black is white, with her own maid in witness as support.”

There are other advantages enjoyed by women too. A surprising number of townswomen are literate. Nunneries might be poor in their endowments but they are keen on their schools, and they educate as many girls as boys. Then there is old age. If a woman survives giving birth repeatedly there is every chance she will reach a greater age than her husband. Her respectability will have improved in comparison to his too. Men over the age of sixty are often seen as something of an embarrassment, no longer masculine, and unable to fulfill the dominant male role in society.
²⁴
Women on the other hand are seen as having lost nothing in strength but having gained much in wisdom. Women do not have to enter tithings—the social control mechanism of the peasantry (see
chapter 10
). Another subtle advantage arises from the female role within the household. While it is true that women take on most of the routine work within the community—including washing clothes, tending the sick, and laying out the dead—the result is that they are far more aware of what is going on in the neighborhood. This also applies to their own households; through seeing with their own eyes what the servants have been up to, they have a far better idea of what is actually going on than their husbands. In many wealthy households the wife is the link between the staff and her husband, who might be elsewhere on business. She rules the household in her husband’s absence and, when he returns, she tells him what needs doing and who must be disciplined, if she has not already seen to this herself. For these women it is hardly worth considering what the Bible says about females. Their own position is very much to their advantage, and if it requires occasional lip service to the odd snippet of biblical history to preserve the order of their home, then so be it.

As you can see, the lot of a woman in medieval England depends very much on her luck in the marriages stakes. Some husbands are absolutely devoted to their wives. This includes kings—Edward I, Edward III, and Henry IV, in particular, all deeply love their wives—as well as magnates and lesser men. In describing her married life, Christine de Pisan writes lovingly of her late husband, telling how, when he married her (when she was fifteen), he did not force her to make love with him on their wedding night, wanting her first to get used to his presence. Chaucer’s own view is unequivocal: “What is better than wisdom? Woman. And what is better than a good woman? Nothing.”

At the other extreme, a bad marriage can be fatal, literally, for the woman. That is why it is so cruel for a manorial bailiff to force a bondwoman to marry against her will. There is nothing she will be able to do to stop being bound to a man who will rape her and beat her, take and spend all her wealth, and force her into a life of repetitive drudgery, and then perhaps abandon her. On top of that, with every child she conceives she runs a small but significant risk of a painful death, roughly equating to a one in ten chance of dying over the course of having five children (see
chapter 9
). Her marriage vows include her oath to remain sexually faithful to her abusive husband—although he himself does not have to promise likewise—and if she leaves him she forfeits not only all her possessions but any dowry which would be rightfully hers should she outlive him. Given that some women find themselves in exactly this situation, it is not surprising to learn that there is a saint, St. Wylgeforte, to watch out for women who are plagued by bad husbands. You cannot help but have some sympathy for those women who have no one else to call on but St. Wylgeforte.

In the autumn of 1379 Sir John Arundel—younger brother of the earl of Arundel—rides up to a convent with a detachment of soldiers, planning to sail to Brittany. He sends for the prioress and asks for accommodation for himself and his men while they wait for the wind to change. The prioress is reluctant, fearing the number of armed youths with Arundel, but, since it is her duty to offer hospitality to wayfarers, including soldiers, she eventually agrees. Unfortunately, the wind does not change. To relieve the monotony the soldiers start drinking and flirting with some of the nuns. Unsurprisingly the nuns refuse their advances and lock themselves in their dormitory. Undeterred, the soldiers force their way in and rape them. This sets off a crime spree. They loot the nunnery. They enter a nearby church to steal the chalice and silverware, and they encounter a wedding party. They draw their swords; remove the newly married bride from her husband, family, and friends; and take it in turns to rape her too. Then, seeing that the wind is at last changing, they take this woman and as many of the nuns as they can out to their ship and set sail. A day or so later, a storm blows up from the east. The ship is swept off course and begins to take on water. Arundel gives the order for all the women to be thrown overboard, to lighten the load. Sixty women are hurled mercilessly into the turbulent sea as the ship heads on towards the coast of Ireland.
¹

This story is an extreme one, and it would be wrong to suggest it is a typical crime. Nevertheless it is believed in its entirety by the chronicler who writes it down, Thomas Walsingham, and that is the important point here. Medieval people believe that groups of young men do behave like this. Certainly young men can be extremely selfish and destructive, especially when armed, bored, drunk, and in a
gang. As most of them travel with a sword, it is inevitable that there are undercurrents of fear and confrontation wherever they go. It is not sexism that prevents a woman from traveling between towns by herself, it is simply a sensible precaution. Add such exacerbating factors as geographical isolation and the relative lawlessness which prevails when there are few means of detecting a criminal’s identity after the event, and you can see why medieval society is more fearful, guarded, and violent than that with which you are familiar.

Common men are conscripted to take part in the king’s wars, and it is assumed that any man can—and will—fight. In many parts of the realm—especially on the south coast and the two Marches (those areas bordering Wales and Scotland)—men regularly have to defend their property from invaders. Also, the gangs roaming the countryside in the early part of the century force people in relatively safe areas to take up arms for the sake of self-preservation. As a result, many men practice archery and swordmanship as a means of self-defense, militarizing themselves in order to protect their property. A streak of violence runs through the whole population, attacker and defender alike.

This violence runs hand in hand with another dislikable aspect of the medieval character. People can be exceedingly cruel to one another. When you witness the punishments meted out to wrongdoers you begin to understand something of how the medieval mind works—how it seeks to expiate crime through the most hideous punishments, including hanging, disemboweling, and quartering. In the modern world we understand that the greater the severity of a crime, the longer the punishment should be. In the medieval world the worse the crime, the more extreme the
nature
of the punishment. Cruelty appears in day-to-day life too. People have few or no qualms about inflicting pain on animals and children. It is universally believed that beating dogs is the correct and best way to treat them, to get them to behave. Cockfighting is thought of as a children’s game. Women as well as men love to watch bearbaiting and bullbaiting. These are not minority interests but hugely popular forms of entertainment. Anything that involves bloodshed is bound to draw a crowd.

Just as women married to brutal husbands can expect to suffer domestic violence, so too can children and servants. Children can expect to suffer as much from their mother’s hands as from their father’s. One educational tract,
How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,
states
that “if your children are rebellious and do not bow, or if any of them misbehave, do not curse them, but take a smart rod and beat them in a row, till they cry mercy and be aware of their guilt.”
²
Likewise “the good lady” in Chaucer’s “Sea Captain’s Tale” is described as having “a little girl for company, a pupil under her authority, quite young, and as yet subject to the rod.” A dialogue book from the period states that “if ye have children, so chastise them with the rod and inform them with good manners [all] the time that they be young.”
³
some men maintain that a good father will beat his children at every opportunity, instilling in them a fear of breaking the law, whereas a lenient father is negligent of his duties. That children as young as seven can be hanged for theft perhaps goes some way to explaining these extreme measures (in the sense that violent discipline is part of a stiff moral education). But even so, boys are bound to grow up with an understanding that there is nothing wrong in a man exercising violence against children, servants, animals, and women. Give a gang of such boys swords at the age of seventeen or eighteen, and give them a lot to drink and put them under the command of a man like Sir John Arundel—and the result is a tragedy.

In such a violent environment it is important to know who your friends are, so great value is set upon loyalty. When lords fall out with each other, all their retainers and servants fall out with their opposite numbers too. In 1385 two men in the service of the king’s half brother, Sir John Holland, have an argument with two esquires in the service of the earl of Stafford. Stafford’s esquires murder Holland’s men. Holland himself then takes up his dead servants’ cause with Sir Ralph Stafford, the earl’s eldest son. Unfortunately Sir Ralph stands resolutely by his father’s servants. In the heat of the argument, Holland draws his sword and kills young Stafford, creating a state of war between the two houses.