1 Village Children
I blame my students for this book. A few years ago some of my students were discussing the possible effects of the Black Death on family structures, and they asked me what happened to all the children and young people left orphaned by the first, and most devastating arrival of the Black Death in mid-fourteenth-century England. I felt that I was not able to answer their questions satisfactorily and at the same time my own curiosity was awakened. This book is the fruit of the resultant research.
At the heart of the research for this book are the societies and communities of later medieval rural England, a world I know most about. While research on childhood and adolescence in medieval urban contexts has increased in recent years, we still know very little about childhood in the villages and hamlets which housed the vast majority of the medieval English population. Most medieval children would have grown up in villages. Their experiences would have been defined by the seasonal changes in the agricultural year, fields growing with crops, livestock farming and the complex social dynamics of rural communities, their kinship networks, neighbours and parish structures. Their horizons would not necessarily have stopped at the crossroads outside their villages to the next town as we shall see, but for most children the vast majority of their young lives would have been spent within fairly small, and often tight-knit communities, centred around a manor and a parish church as the most important institutions of local authority.
To many modern ears this may sound romantic. We live in a world which is increasingly anxious and concerned about how much time our youngsters spend indoors, playing on a whole host of electronic devices, instead of climbing trees, hunting for butterflies and pond dipping. A few years ago Richard Louv tapped into these worries with his book Last Child in the Woods where he described a phenomenon he called ‘nature deficit disorder’, childhoods bereft of nature, leading to mental ill health and unbalanced young people. 1 More recently, a petition was making its way across social media, including Facebook demanding that nature-related words, such as cygnet, bluebell and acorn should be reinstated into the Junior Oxford English dictionary. The petition, once again, echoed concerns that rising childhood obesity and mental illness must surely be related to a declining engagement of children with nature. 2
Perhaps because academics like to think in binaries, rural childhood has often been presented in dichotomous terms. Commentators have been inclined to pit images of rural idyll against the alienated dirty landscape of inner cities, from the left such stereotypes were underpinned by the conceptualisation of the brutal vagaries of industrial capitalism against an often romanticised, and backward-looking imagined golden age of the village community, which rural historians of medieval England in particular are only too familiar with. 3 The imagined idyll of the rural child is also intimately bound up with imagery of the natural child first set out by Rousseau in his famous book Emile in the eighteenth century. 4 Indeed the link between ideas of nature and childhood can be traced back to medieval times. In the twelfth-century, Life of St Anselm its author Eadmer describes how in discussion with an abbot about the education of young people St. Anselm likens children to trees which need care and freedom from fear to develop well with good morality. 5
Yet while the concept of the ideal childhood is intertwined with nature and often contrasted with the unnatural—hence harmful—urban sphere, within the exploration of rural childhood one can also locate another dichotomised image. Literature and the media is dominated by images of children in the countryside engaged with nature, playing alongside streams and in flowering meadows. As Powell et al. are at pains to point out, however, the study of modern rural childhood has worked hard on the deconstruction of this idyllic and nostalgic view. 6 The flipside of the positive images are defined by social and economic factors. Boredom for young people, prying neighbours, lack of educational opportunities, a significant element of rural poverty, and a life which could be harsh and unforgiving, especially in the past. 7
As researchers of the past, it is impossible for us to escape the present. As a result, I researched this book, enmeshed in these concerns of modern life with the aim to find out more about the rural children of the later middle ages . While the impact of crises like the Black Death and the early fourteenth-century famine were at the forefront of my mind, my main concern was also to find out about contemporary, medieval attitudes to children and young people, what those attitudes tell us about the communities they lived in—including the adult world, and to what extent young people of the middle ages were able to decide their own paths in life. Were young people oppressed and exploited—as has been intimated in some studies—were they treated as adults? Did they have rights and were they considered to be vulnerable? In asking these questions, a number of problems soon became apparent. Firstly, I felt that I was asking the wrong questions, as they were too grounded in our contemporary conceptualisations of childhood; the root problem of this, I felt, was that I was still hampered by the debate caused by the publication of P. Ariѐs’ seminal study Centuries of Childhood in 1968, which effectively threw the proverbial gauntlet at medievalists with the now famous assertion that the notion of childhood did not exist in medieval society. Instead, it is important to move beyond such earlier discussions about historic, especially medieval childhood sparked by Ariѐs, as they seemed to be addressing the wrong questions, and thereby answering them in a rather unsatisfying way. (The discourse typically went something like this: Was Ariѐs right? No, he was not, there were concepts of childhood in medieval society.) The attempt to show that there was a concept of childhood in medieval England in refuting Ariѐs is useful and important. However, the analysis of the question can only lead one philosophically speaking up the garden path, a pretty and interesting one, but one with serious limitations. The danger is that in focusing on Ariѐs and thereby allowing him to set the research agenda, it becomes difficult to seek answers beyond the parameters set by him.
Ariѐs absolutely has to be credited with opening the field of childhood studies for historians. His work was of importance, not just in arguing—quite rightly—the now widely accepted view that the concept of childhood itself is a construct; but also in daring to look at the topic of the history of childhood in the first place. Still, while medievalists have successfully shown that in the middle ages children were not so integrated into the adult world that children were treated like little adults, a slightly different approach is required now which looks at the topic of medieval childhood in a more holistic manner, which moves beyond Ariѐs’ concerns, asking not whether an idea of childhood existed, but rather how childhood was conceptualised on the ground, how communities interacted with young people, how medieval people conceptualised learning and training, and even more importantly, how young people themselves fed into these structures and made them their own. With this in mind I wanted to look at the young people themselves; and attempt to view their world not merely through the eyes of their adult contemporaries, a highly challenging, and perhaps almost impossible task, as our extant documentary sources were all written by adults.
Ariѐs’ genius was that he rightly pointed out that, in essence, childhood as a concept is specific to particular social and cultural contexts. As such, Heywood has argued that childhood can be seen as an ‘abstraction’. 8 Ideas of childhood are at variance according to cultural, social geographic and chronological contexts. Ariѐs’ grave mistake was his subsequent application of a presentist perspective which sought to define childhood in past European societies according to definitions of childhood prevalent in the 1960s. Of course, this led to the ludicrous conclusion that there was no concept of childhood in medieval times. The reaction by medievalists is understandable, yet also somewhat problematic. The aim—quite rightly—was to show that Ariѐs was wrong. It was pointed out that he looked at the wrong sources, that he neglected sources, that his view was too narrow, that he did not consult a wealth of material which did, in fact, show that a concept of childhood did actually exist in medieval society. They argued and demonstrated that childhood was perceived as a separate stage to adulthood and that children—at different ages were associated with different characteristics. 9 The result of all this important research, as Heywood succinctly summarised in a recent publication is that ‘among those active in the field the argument that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” is assuredly dead in the water’. 10
Satisfying as this might be, we are only beginning to understand medieval childhood in its own right. Many of the excellent studies on medieval childhood have concentrated not just on urban environments, but also the better off in society. 11 As a result, we have learned that medieval thinkers divided childhood into different developmental stages, there was also advice for childbirth, the nursing of infants as well as successful weaning . 12 We know that there was a culture of childhood and children played with toys , and a substantial amount of literature has explored the experiences of growing up in urban contexts, including the nature and regulation of apprenticeships. 13
The key objective for this book was...