Abstract
The first part of the book focusses on perceptions of and the mainly legal interactions with children and young people by village communities, law makers and lords. Müller offers a detailed exploration of village children as perceived as vulnerable on the one hand, and in need of protection, while at the same time being accorded increasing responsibilities and economic agency. A much needed and in-depth analysis of the concept of full age and maturity not only reveals significant local variation in manorial custom, but also shows that medieval villagers were less focussed on numerical age as such, and more interested in the achievement of social and economic competences by young people to measure maturity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Records of the Manor of Elderfield: The Hive, Worcester Archives, BA 1531/69 (A and B).
Glastonbury Abbey Records held at Longleat House, sourced from microfilm, held by the University of Birmingham.
Halesowen Manor Court Rolls, Birmingham Library and Archive, Wolfson Centre.
Heacham Manor Court Rolls, sourced from microfilm held at the Norfolk Record Office, Le Strange Collection, MS DA1.
J. Amphlett, Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales 1272–1307, Part I (Worcestershire Record Society, Oxford, 1910).
P. Foden, ed. and trans., Records of the Manor of Norton in the Liberty of St. Albans, 1244–1539, vol. 29 (Caxton Hill, Hertford: Hertfordshire Record Publications, 2014).
F.J. Furnivall, ed., The Babees Book, the Bokes of Nurture (London: Early English Text Society, 1868).
P.J.P. Goldberg, Women in England c. 1275–1525 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
H. Jewel, The Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield from September 1348–September 1350 (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Second Series, vol. II, 1981).
J. Lister, ed., Court Rolls of the Manor of Wakefield, 1315–1317, vol. IV (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1930).
R. Lock, ed., The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows, 1303–1350 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer and Suffolk Record Society, vol. xli, 1998).
R. Lock, The Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows 1351–1399 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press and Suffolk Record Society, vol. xlv, 2002).
D. Noy, ed. and trans., Winslow Manor Court Books Part I 1327–1377, Buckinghamshire Record Society, no. 35 (2011).
Rentalia et Customaria Michaeilis de Ambresbury 1235–1252 et Rogeri Ford 1252–1261 Abbatum Beatae Mariae Glastoniae (Somerset Record Society, 1891).
Henrici de Bracton de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, ed., Travers Twiss (London, vol. 2, 1879).
L.R. Poos and L. Bonfield, eds., Select Cases in Manorial Courts 1250–1550, Property and Family Law, Selden Society (London: Selden Society, vol. CXIV, 1998).
H. Rothwell, ed., English Historical Documents 1189–1327 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1975).
Secondary Sources Books
P. Ariés, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
W.O. Ault, Open Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study in Village By-Laws (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972).
M. Bailey, The English Manor c. 1200–c. 1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
A.V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, eds., D. Thorner, B. Kerblay, R.E.F. Smith (Homewood, IL: American Economic Association, R.D. Irwing, 1966).
W.A. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood, Fourth Edition (London, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington, DC: Sage, 2014).
H. Dawson, Unearthing Late Medieval Children, Health, Status and Burial Practice in Southern England (BAR British Series 593, 2014).
C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
C. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages the People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002).
J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory, New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).
B.A. Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
B.A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
A.E. Levett, Studies in Manorial History, eds., H.M. Cam, M. Coate, and L.S. Sutherland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938).
M.K. McInosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
S. McSheffrey, ed., Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo, MI: Published for TEAMS the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages; Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).
H. Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2001).
L.R. Poos, A Rural Society After the Black Death Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
P.R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200–1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
M. Woodhead and H. Montgomery, eds., Understanding Childhood an Interdisciplinary Approach (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons and the Open University, 2003).
Secondary Sources Articles and Chapters
S. Bardsley, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered; Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, in: Past and Present, vol. 165 (November 1999), pp. 3–29.
S. Bardsley, ‘Sin, Speech and Scolding in Late Medieval England’, in: T. Fenster and D.L. Smail, eds., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (London: Conell University Press, 2003), pp. 145–165.
J.M. Bennett, ‘Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England’, in: Past and Present, vol. 134 (1992), pp. 19–41.
E. Clark, ‘The Custody of Children in English Manor Courts’, in: Law and History Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 333–348.
E. Clark, ‘Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside’, in: Journal of British Studies, vol. 33, no. 4 (1994), pp. 381–406.
C. Dyer, ‘Power and Conflict in the Medieval English Village’, in: C. Dyer, ed., Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Hambledon Press and London, 2000), pp. 1–13.
M. Eccleston, ‘Mortality of Rural Landless Men Before the Black Death: The Glastonbury Head Tax Lists’, in: Local Population Studies, vol. 63 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 6–29.
T. Fenster and D.L. Smail, ‘Introduction’, in: T. Fenster and D.L. Smail, eds., Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (London: Conell University Press, 2003), pp. 1–14.
H. Fox, ‘The Exploitation of the Landless by Lords and Tenants in Early Medieval England’, in: Z. Razi and R.M. Smith, eds., Medieval Society and the Manor Court (1996), pp. 518–568.
R. Goddard, ‘Female Apprenticeships in the West Midlands in the Later Middle Ages’, in: Midlands History, vol. 27, no. 1 (2002), pp. 165–181.
P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Masters and Men in Later Medieval England’, in: D. M. Hadley, ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 56–70.
P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘What Was a Servant?’, in: A. Curry and E. Matthew, eds., Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 1–20.
B.A. Hanawalt, ‘Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England’, in: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 8, no. 1 (Summer, 1977), pp. 1–22.
B.A. Hanawalt, ‘The Child in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, in: W. Koops and M. Zuckerman, eds., Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 21–42.
M. Holford, ‘Testimony (to Some Extent Fictitious)’: Proofs of Age in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, in: Historical Research, vol. 82, no. 218 (November 2009), pp. 635–654.
A.E. Levett, ‘The Courts and Court Rolls of St. Albans Abbey’, in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 7 (1924), pp. 52–76.
C. Lewis, ‘Children’s Play in the Later Medieval English Countryside’ in: Childhood in the Past, vol. 2, no. 1 (2009), pp. 86–108.
M. Lewis, ‘Work and the Adolescent in Medieval England ad 900–1550: The Osteological Evidence’, in: Medieval Archaeology, vol. 60, no. 1 (2016), pp. 138–171.
M. Müller, ‘A Divided Class? Peasants and Peasant Communities in Later Medieval England’, in: C. Dyer et al., eds., Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages (Past and Present Supplement 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 115–120.
M. Müller, ‘Conflict and Revolt: The Bishop of Ely and His Peasants at the Manor of Brandon in Suffolk ca. 1300–1381’, in: Rural History, vol. 23, no. 1 (April 2012). pp. 1–19.
M. Müller, ‘Peasant Women, Agency and Status in Mid-Thirteenth to Late-Fourteenth Century England: Some Reconsiderations’, in: C. Beattie and M.F. Stevens, eds., Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 91–114.
M. Müller, ‘The Aims and Organisation of an Early Fourteenth Century Revolt in Wiltshire’, in: Rural History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2002), pp. 1–20.
M. Müller, ‘Social Control and the Hue and Cry in Two Fourteenth Century Villages’, in: Journal of Medieval History, vol. 31, no. 1 (2005), pp. 29–53.
Z. Razi and R.M. Smith, ‘The Historiography of Manorial Court Rolls’, in: Z. Razi and R.M. Smith, eds., Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12.
C. Wickham, ‘Gossip and Resistance Among Medieval Peasants’, in: Past and Present, vol. 160, no. 1 (August 1998), pp. 3–24.
N. Zemon-Davis, ‘The Reasons for Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France’, in: Past & Present, vol. 50, no. 1 (1971), pp. 41–75.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Müller, M. (2019). Vulnerable Members of the Community. In: Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03602-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03602-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03601-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03602-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)