Abstract
The Proof of Age was a document produced at a hearing held by the escheator to determine whether the heir to property held in chief had reached legal age. The substance of the proceeding was the collection of 12 memories from men of the village telling how or why they remembered the date of the heir’s birth and baptism 21 years ago (or 14, or 16, for heiresses). These memories open a window on the events of daily life: seeing the baptism, burying a relative, buying a horse, telling of a great windstorm, and more of such memories. Whether all the memories were based on “what really happened” or were formulaic responses, has been debated. But regardless, they were all deemed sufficient and in their large numbers they shed light on the ordinary life of ordinary men (and what these men learned from “their” women).
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Notes
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For the Proofs, these references cover some of the basic treatments and the attached notes and bibliographies are a gateway to the whole question of the Proofs as a primary source: Sue Sheridan Walker, “Proof of Age of Heirs in Medieval England,” Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), 306–23: Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003), 1–62, 161–79: J. Bedell, “Memory and Proof of Age in England 1272–1327,” Past and Present 162 (1999), 3–27: Matthew Holford, “‘Testimony (to some extent fictitious)’: Proofs of Age in the first half of the fifteenth century,” Historical Research (2008), 1–25: W. D. Deller, “The Texture of Literacy in the Memories of Late Medieval Proof-of-Age Jurors,” Journal of Medieval History 38/2 (2012), 1–15: W. S. Deller, “Proofs of Age 1246 to 1430: their Nature, Veracity and Use as Sources,” in The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem: Mapping the Medieval Countryside and Rural Society, ed. Michael Hicks (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 136–60. The literature on social memory and orality and literacy is so extensive that a reference to a few basic (or classic) items has to suffice: M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1993): James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). There is a special issue on oral history, memory, and the written tradition: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th series, 9 (1999).
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Rosenthal, J.T. (2018). Introduction. In: Social Memory in Late Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69700-0_1
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