Seven Ages of Britain
Channel 4's Seven Ages of Britain explores the lives and times of the ordinary people of the British Isles who rarely emerge into the light of written history but nonetheless were witness to its every twist and turn. In this edited extract from the book that accompanies the television series, the author Justin Pollard – who was also the producer of the series – looks at the changes that women experienced following the Black Death of the 14th century …
The chronic shortage of labour that was one consequence of the Black Death brought opportunities for work and trade to women that would not be seen again until the First World War.
Life in towns
Many of these new opportunities sprang up in towns, to which young women had been coming in greater numbers than men since Norman times. Towns had always offered an escape for women from the constraints of village life and a chance to earn independent wages, frequently in service.
However, the available work was often limited. Many a hopeful migrant found that the streets in medieval British towns were not always paved with gold, and begging and prostitution in the slum suburbs were ever-present. Indeed, we take the modern word 'bordello' from bordellus, the Latin word for the slum cottages inhabited by the suburban class (known as 'bordars').
An expanded role
After the Black Death, however, women found themselves in demand to run the infrastructure of town life. For centuries, they had been unofficially involved in business, often controlling many aspects of their husbands' trades, from hiring, managing and training apprentices to compiling accounts. Indeed, to become a master of his guild, a man had to be married – not to prove his respectability but to provide himself with the business partner who would ensure that his workshop operated on a firm administrative footing.
Now, with so many masters dead of plague, the women's role expanded. They now gained entry to many guilds that needed astute practitioners to keep their craft alive. They could join as apprentices, either as single women (known as femmes soles) or married (femmes couverts), and might rise to become masters in their own right. In London, the customs of the City went as far as to state that, on a master's death, his wife would become responsible for continuing his business or for finding someone to do so. In return, she would be made a full citizen of London with all the rights and privileges that afforded.
A diamond of a woman
One woman who thrived in this atmosphere was Joanna Hill, who lived in a rented tenement building called the Three Nuns, behind St Botolph's Church, then just outside the walls of the City of London, in the 1420s and 1430s. As a young girl, she had met a London bell-founder called Richard – perhaps when, as an apprentice, he had come to her village to hang a new church bell. Bell-founding was a booming industry at the time as churches everywhere were being added to or rebuilt, and a successful founder was quite a catch.
The match was made and Joanna came to London as Richard's wife. He seems to have been highly successful, running a major foundry from 1418 onwards, and 23 of his bells survive to this day, scattered across the country from Cornwall to Rutland.
In May 1440, however, Richard died, leaving Joanna as the sole executor of his will. But she did not intend to sit back and live off his money. Instead, she threw herself into the business, producing more than 20 bells in the following year, seven of which still ring in belfries today. Her pride in her work is clear: alongside the shield-shaped mark of her husband, she added a diamond, the heraldic symbol for a woman, on each bell she produced. It was her mark, proof that she was now running the business.
Real affection
When she, too, died, only a year after her husband, her will showed how successful she had been. In the previous year, she had taken on a new apprentice, so new in fact that she couldn't remember his name when it came to leaving him a few shillings. Worried about Purgatory, she left the huge sum of 70 marks for seven years of masses for her and Richard's souls. Showing real affection for her late husband, she also left 20 pounds for special requiem masses to be sung for him on the anniversary of his death for the next 20 years.
Her best red gown, lined with fur, she left to her daughter Joanna, and she did not forget the poor and sick of her parish or the people of the Surrey village where she was born. She left her business in an excellent position, and she would have been proud to known that, 20 years after her death, another woman was running her foundry.
A degree of arrangement
While women were now gaining entry into the business world, the road to success usually involved marriage. In the later Middle Ages, marriage was as much about consolidating social and financial ties as about love and, for most women, had at least a degree of arrangement about it. From the Church's perspective, marriage was the next best thing to becoming a nun or hermit as it provided a framework in which the unpleasant business of procreation could legitimately be carried out – something that was in great need in the years after 1350.
The events that brought a woman to the church on her wedding day – or, rather, to the porch, where marriages were solemnised – might have begun many years before. For William Aungier and Joanna Malcake, it had begun on the death of William's parents from plague. When he was eight, his guardians had 'married' him to Joanna, who was two years his senior, probably for financial reasons. However, as William and Joanna were still children, in the eyes of the law they would not be officially married until William came of age and consented retrospectively to the marriage.
Mercenary marriage market
Marriage meant mutual vows, which children could not make. And that was where William and Joanna's problems began. For three years, the couple lived separately, he at school in Norfolk and she at home in Yorkshire, only seeing each other for two weeks in that time. Then William's guardians heard rumours that the 16-year-old Joanna had slept with several men and was now pregnant. William, not quite 14, was rushed to Joanna's house and ordered to consummate the marriage. He told a friend: 'It displeases me that I knew her once for she does not prize an affection that is upheld. And, therefore, for sure, I intend never to consent to her that she be my wife, nor to cohabit with her.'
After a week of cajoling by Joanna's neighbours, William spent a night with his 'bride', but he kept his word to his friend. He refused to accept the marriage, moved away from the house and, in the spring of 1397, took the case to court. The financial concerns that had made the match good enough for William's guardians were clearly not enough for William who, even in this mercenary marriage market, had hoped for at least a little love, too.
Brokering partnerships
Where the issue of money and land was less pressing, women had to protect their honour not only from the men of the village but from the vagaries of the law. In theory, the simple act of saying 'I take you to be my husband/wife' was marriage in the eyes of the law, regardless of where the vow was taken – sex simply provided the additional proof that a Church court might need to settle the matter. It was thus in the negotiation of marriage in return for sex that many village partnerships were brokered.
In 1358, when Robert Midleton asked Alice Welwyk to sleep with him, she, quite naturally, said she would only consent if he married her. He replied that he could not vow to marry her as he didn't know if she could bear children, but – he promised her servant – if they had sex and she fell pregnant, he would marry her. This was not a great deal for Alice, but she was persuaded.
In fact, Robert was simply trying to evade the law. When a better match presented itself, to a woman from a wealthy local family, he dropped poor pregnant Alice. She was paid off, and did not dispute the reading of the banns for Robert and his soon-to-be wife. It was only nine years later that she attempted to have his marriage annulled by the court on the grounds that she had married him first. But as the court pointed out, the manipulative Robert had made no vow to her, and she lost her case.
From maiden to wife
Other women were more cunning. On 17 October 1355, Maud Schipyn paid what might have been a costly visit to one Robert Smyth at his home in Bolton Percy. When she arrived, she was a maiden, but thanks to her knowledge of the law, she was Robert's wife when she left some hours later. How she achieved this is, fortunately, recorded:
Margaret Thaker had been taken ill in the basement of Robert Smyth's house. And she saw through the door of the basement how Robert pushed and pulled Maud inside and there he tried to know her carnally. And Maud had said, 'Our God forbade that you should have the power to know me carnally unless you will marry me.' So Robert answered, 'Behold my oath that, if I take anyone to be my wife, I shall take you if you will yield to me.' And Maud replied, 'Behold my oath that I will be at your disposal.' And so Robert took her in his arms and threw her to the ground and knew her carnally.
Of course, Robert had little intention of marriage and, within a few weeks, was strenuously denying what he had done. He didn't know that it was too late. Maud knew that, legally, she was married to Robert, and to prove it, she took him to court.
Vows and sex
On 22 December, Maud and the now-recovered Margaret Thaker appeared confidently before the Church court that met in the south transept of York Minster. The court was used to such cases – it dealt with over 200 contested marriages each year. The Church would even pay for those too poor to afford lawyers to bring cases – a form of medieval legal aid – and since 1362, access to the law had been further increased when a statute had ordained that all pleas were to be made in English.
People came to court to escape violent or otherwise unhappy marriages, using the only excuse the Church would accept for annulment: that these marriages had been incorrectly entered into.
This case, though, was the opposite. With a witness to the fact that Robert and Maud had both made vows and that consummation had quickly followed, Robert didn't have a leg to stand on. The vows alone were proof of marriage; the evidence of sex doubled it. Robert was married, whether he liked it or not.
First to suffer
Many of the advances made by women in the second half of the 14th century did not endure. By the mid-15th century, Britain's economy was in recession, and with less demand for workers, women were the first to suffer. In 1461, female weavers were told by their Bristol guild that they should give up their jobs in favour of the men who had been fighting for their country – a sentiment that almost exactly echoes the advertising campaigns at the end of the First World War, which encouraged women to 'go back to the kitchen' and leave their jobs to the men returning from the front.
Having learnt the trades and kept the economy going through the bad times, women's competition was no longer wanted. By 1511, the men of the weavers' guild in Norwich were even claiming that women could not weave because they were not strong enough to operate the looms – which, until then, they had clearly proved was not the case.
