Abstract
In the summer of 1481 Richard Cely, a young wool merchant, wrote to his brother George. He reported that he had met with the sister of a family friend, and judged that she was an appropriate marital prospect for George. Richard discussed the matter with his father, Richard senior, as they walked together in their new orchard, and Richard senior instructed his son to write to George to encourage him to pursue the opportunity. However, these men were not just talking about respectable marriage prospects, but also the death of a child. The child in question was George’s illegitimate baby by a woman who lived in Calais, and not only was Richard senior aware of the relationship, he was sympathetic to his son’s loss. Richard Cely junior’s letter neatly provides examples of why the Cely correspondence is so interesting: here we have evidence of familial affection and paternal authority, courtship patterns, and attitudes toward extramarital relationships. George and Richard junior, both in their early twenties, in this letter appear to be both in friendly confidence with their father and under his paternal authority. At this point in their lives the Cely sons are in a transitional life phase as they begin to move from adolescence into manhood, their sexual behaviour and obedience to their father reflecting their place in the adolescent life stage, whilst their attempts to find wives indicate a shift toward attaining manhood. The Cely letters thus provide an invaluable resource for studying late medieval adolescence and male sexuality.
Sir, our father and I came together in the new orchard last Friday, and he asked me many questions of you, and I told him all as it was, and he was right sorry for the death of the child, and I told him of the good will that the Whigstons and Daltons have to you, and how I liked the young gentlewoman, and he commanded me to write to you that he would gladly that it were brought about and that you laboured it betimes.1
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’Syr, howr father and I comende togydyr in the new orchard on Fryday laste, and a [he] askyd me many qwestyonys of gyu, and I towlde hym aull as hyt whos, and he whos ryught sory for the dethe of the sch[y]lde, and I toulde hym of the good whyll that the Whegystons and Dawltons hows to yow, and how I lykyd the 3enge gentyllwhoman, and he commaunded me to whryte to yow and he whowlde gladly that hyt whor brohut abohut and that 3e labyrde hyt betymys …’ Richard Cely junior to George Cely, 4 June 1481. Alison Hanham (ed.), The Cely Letters Early English Text Society, o.s., 273 (London, 1975), no. 117, p. 107. All references from the Cely letters are from this edition, hereafter CL. Translations from Middle English are my own; some minor vocabulary and syntax changes have been made to ease understanding.
See, for instance, P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992) and Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester, 2003).
Deborah Young provides a useful survey of current scholarship on medieval adolescence in The Life-Cycle in Western Europe, c.1300 — c.1500 (Manchester, 2006), but seems to mostly consider adolescence to be a time of transition between childhood and adulthood rather than, as I argue, a key life stage. P.J.P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy’s edited collection Youth in the Middle Ages (York, 2004) is useful, but uses ‘youth’ as an umbrella term that also embraces childhood, and does not try to define adolescence. Likewise the interesting collection edited by Konrad Eisenbilcher, The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650 (Toronto, 2002). Barbara Hanawalt’s Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford, 2003) attempts a more comprehensive definition (pp. 9–13, 111–13). Ruth Mazo Karras argues that medieval people considered adolescence as a subset of adulthood in From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 13–14. James Schultz, meanwhile, has argued that there was no medieval adolescence in his provocative article ‘Medieval adolescence: the claims of history and the silence of German narrative’, Speculum 66 (1991), 519–39. Schultz’s conclusions, drawn from Middle High German texts, do not match my reading of Middle English sources, particularly regarding identity formation and inter-generational conflict.
Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner, Men’s Lives (Boston, 1989), p. x.
Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, 2005), p. 155.
Key publications on medieval masculinities include: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York, 1997); D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999); Jacqueline Murray (ed.), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West (New York, 1999); Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2003).
An exception is Joel T. Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia, 1991).
See Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London, 1992) and Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001).
Quoted in J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1996), p. 23.
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), p. 145.
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedon and Gabrielle L. Caffee (London, 1977), p. 68.
On social puberty, see Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, p. 10. Sandra Cavallo writes usefully on the mobility of Italian urban youths, albeit in an early modern context. Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester, 2007), pp. 142–43.
J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford, 1996).
Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (Washington, 1923), ll. 1765–71.
Noel James Menuge, Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law (Cambridge, 2001), p. 2; Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 112.
See Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class in Medieval London: 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 192–93; David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Harvard, 1985), pp. 107–09; Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 16. On English gentry marriage patterns, see Keith Dockray, ‘Why did fifteenth-century English gentry marry?’, in M.C.E. Jones (ed.), Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval England (Gloucester, 1986), pp. 61–80.
Christine Carpenter (ed.), Kingsford Stonor Letters 1290–1483 (Cambridge, 1996), nos. 109–10, pp. 200–02. Hereafter SL.
’[T]he said Sir William promised the said Lord Clyfford that they should not lygg togedder till she came to the age of xvj yeres.’ Joan Kirby (ed.), The Plumpton Letters and Papers (Cambridge, 1996), Appendix 1, no. 2, p. 230.
Medieval naturalists noted that, whilst adolescence might mark the actualisation of generative ability, it was not the perfect age to reproduce. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), p. 145. Barbara Harris notes that contracts for dowries often stipulated that the dowry should be returned if bride or groom died before the age of 16, suggesting that before this the marriage would have gone unconsummated. Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women (Oxford, 2002), p. 45. See also Phillips, Medieval Maidens, pp. 38–41, and John Carmi Parsons, ‘Mothers, daughters, marriage, power: some plantagenet evidence 1150–1500’, in John Carmi Parsons (ed.), Medieval Queenship (New York, 1997), pp. 63–8.
‘Angelicus iuvenis senibus satanizat in annis.’ J.A. Burrow, ‘“Young saint, old devil”: reflections on a medieval proverb’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 30 (1979), 385. See also Stoertz, ‘Sex and the medieval adolescent’, p. 226.
Sarah Rhiannon Williams, ‘English vernacular letters c. 1400–1600: language, literacy and culture’ (PhD diss., University of York: York, 2001), pp. 44–5.
For more on letter writing in late medieval England, see: Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park, 2003); Alexander Bergs, Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics: Studies in Morphosyntactic Variation in the Paston Letters (1421–1503) (Berlin, 2005); and Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus (eds), Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia, 1993).
For instance, Stoertz assumes that the only options open to apprentices were ‘celibacy or consorting with prostitutes or concubines’. Stoertz, ‘Sex and the medieval adolescent’, p. 237. Ruth Mazo Karras discusses this academic assumption in ‘Sex and the singlewoman’, in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 127–45.
Allison Hanham, The Celys and Their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 49–51.
Paula M. Reider, On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 (New York, 2006).
Jane Laughton, ‘The Alewives of later medieval Chester’, in Rowena E. Archer (ed.), Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century (Stroud, 1995), p. 202.
Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York, 1996), p. 122.
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford, 1998), pp. 54–5.
For the head of household’s authority over sexual behaviour within his household, see P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Masters and men in later medieval England’, in Hadley, Masculinity in Medieval Europe, pp. 56–70, and Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (Oxford, 1993), pp. 186–96.
Shannon McSheffrey, Sex, Marriage and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, 2006), pp. 65–6.
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© 2011 Rachel E. Moss
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Moss, R.E. (2011). An Orchard, a Love Letter and Three Bastards: The Formation of Adult Male Identity in a Fifteenth-Century Family. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_11
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