The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England

Abstract

The history of great men and events is familiar to every schoolchild but facts of everyday life in bygone eras remain a tantalizing mystery. Now Barbara Hanawalt has lifted curtain on the dark and has provided an intimate view that seems surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. For thesis of this book is that biological needs served by family have never changed and way fourteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for both newborn and aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating harshness of their material environment was not altogether unlike our twentieth-century solutions. Using a variety of medieval sources, notably over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, author emphasizes continuity of nuclear family from middle ages into modern period and explores reasons for such families being basic unit of society and economy. book abounds in fascinating detail, here citing an incantation against rats, there noting hierarchy of bread consumption (our modern supermarket bread could be seen as ultimate fulfillment of peasants' dream of white bread), or games people played. The book makes abundantly clear that what we popularly think of as dark ages are really filled with sunlight as well as shadows and with doings of ordinary people who must get on with business of living and find some joy in it.About Author: Barbara A. Hanawalt is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University and author of Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348.