Space and Gender in the Later Medieval English House

Viator 42 No. 2 (2011) 205–232. 10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.102250

SPACE AND GENDER IN THE LATER MEDIEVAL ENGLISH HOUSE

P. J. P. Goldberg*

Abstract: This article uses “The Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband,” a late fifteenth-century text that asso-ciates men with the outdoors and women with the home and the domestic, as a springboard for a compara-tive analysis of rural and urban housing to explore questions concerning the gender division of space over the course of the English later Middle Ages. The article questions the value of rigid models of gender differ-ence that both normative texts and numbers of modern scholars propose. Drawing upon extant late medieval probate inventories and archaeological evidence, it explores rather different cultural norms between peasant and bourgeois society as reflected in the physical fabric and furnishings of homes. It further considers dif-ferences between different levels of society and over time. The article advocates an interdisciplinary meth-odology and the exploitation of narrative sources, literary or otherwise, to interrogate social practice and the meanings of space. Keywords: gender, space, peasant, house, probate, inventory, later medieval England, gender division of labor, merchant, yeoman. A commentator writing in 2005 on the subject of the “spatial turn” in history observed that there “has clearly been an explosion of interest in this field since the start of the twenty-first century.”1 It may be that scholars working in a later medieval context have not been quite so conscious of this development, but a growing body of scholar-ship can nevertheless be identified. Some works have been produced by historians. A 2006 collection of essays, for example, carries the title People and Space in the Mid-dle Ages, 300–1300.2 To date, however, it is art historians, historical geographers, ar-chaeologists, and especially literary scholars who have most readily embraced space as an analytical tool. Hence we can find recent articles on space in Gower, Lydgate, Julian of Norwich, and Ancrenne Wisse.3 One particular strand of scholarly interest that has been especially productive and has attracted both medieval archaeologists and historians is the relationship between gender and space. To date most work has fo-cused on devotional space and the houses of the élite, but it is Barbara Hanawalt’s thesis of gendered spheres within a peasant context that represents the pioneering contribution.4 On the other hand, work on later medieval vernacular housing, whether rural peasant housing or town housing, has not much engaged with gender. I want to rectify this lacuna by beginning to explore the different cultural meanings and usages

* University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, Exhibition Square, The King’s Manor, YO1 7EP York, UK. Earlier versions of this present paper were given in Cambridge, York, and at a conference held at The German Historical Institute, London in 2010 entitled “From Space to Place: the Spatial Dimension in His-tory of Western Europe.” I am indebted to Prof. Cornelie Usborne and the organizers for inviting me to the London conference.

1 Peter Doorn, “A Spatial Turn in History,” GIM International 19.4 (2005), published electronically at http://www.gim-international.com/index.php.

2 People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300–1300, ed. Wendy Davies et al. (Turnhout 2006). 3 John M. Ganim, “Gower, liminality, and the politics of space,” Exemplaria 19.1 (2007) 90–116; idem,

“Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption,” Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (New York 2008) 165–183; Laura Saetveit Miles, “Space and enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love,” A Companion to Julian of Nor-wich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge 2008) 154–165; Bob Hasenfratz, “The anchorhold as symbolic space in Ancrene Wisse,” Philological Quarterly 84.1 (2007) 1–26.

4 Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York 1986) chap. 9; eadem, “Seeking the flesh and blood of manorial families,” Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988) 33–45.

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of domestic space between rural society, with which the first part of this article is pri-marily concerned, and urban society, the focus of the last part, and between differing social groups. As an historian I am also concerned to explore how these may have changed over the course of the later Middle Ages and the underlying causes of such changes. Inevitably some of my discussion will focus on work and the spatial location of work since work activities account for a significant part of how people spent their time, but exploration of the gender division of labor per se is not my primary concern. It is, however, my intention to challenge some of the assumptions that have entered the broader field in respect of the gendered use of space, including the supposed gen-der-spatial division of labor.

Hanawalt’s model of a spatial division of labor between the sexes, that sees “women’s chief sphere of work as the home and men’s the fields and forests,” is common currency among later medieval social historians.5 It is attractive because it mirrors contemporary normative ideology, especially that which is associated with a clerical authorship. Other scholars have offered parallel models in slightly different late medieval contexts. Thus Margaret Aston in 1990 argued for a segregation of males and females in church, with men to the south and women to the north.6 In 1992 Roberta Gilchrist discussed the cultural resonances of such a north / south division to explain the proliferation of north cloisters associated with women’s religious houses. Two years later her groundbreaking monograph on nunneries used access analysis to show significant differences in the spatial arrangements of male and female religious houses.7 In 1997 Gilchrist also described a pattern of gender-specific zoning within castles, observing that “increasing status seems to be accompanied by greater segrega-tion of women’s quarters.”8 This suggestion is echoed in Amanda Richardson’s 2003 study of English royal palaces which maps the evolution in the spatial arrangements of the king’s and the queen’s apartments over several centuries.9

To discuss at any length the work of scholars who have moved beyond the plebeian household to explore churches, religious houses, castles and palaces is beyond the

5 Hanawalt, “Seeking the flesh and blood of manorial families,” (n. 4 above) 38. Hanawalt’s arguments

rest primarily on her reading of verdicts in coroners’ rolls for the location of men and women who were the victims of fatal accidents whilst at work. It follows that at best Hanawalt is only able to show the spatial location of inherently hazardous work activities. For example, neither weeding, haymaking, nor milking cows and sheep—all women’s work located spatially outdoors—are noticed in her analysis since none of these are hazardous activities. Her analysis assumes that accidental deaths are consistently reported and without gender bias, and that the verdicts recorded were objective and broadly accurate, but these are all questionable. For a fuller critique of the source and Hanawalt’s readings of it see P. J. P. Goldberg, “The Public and the Private: Women in the Pre-Plague Economy,” Thirteenth Century England III, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge 1991) 75–89, 75–81; idem, “Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval Eng-land,” Viator 39.1 (2008) 249–262, 253–258.

6 Margaret Aston, “Segregation in Church,” Women in the Church, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford 1990) 242–281.

7 Roberta Gilchrist, “‘Blessed Art Thou Among Women’: The Archaeology of Female Piety,” Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200–1500, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (Stroud 1992) 212–226; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York 1994).

8 Roberta Gilchrist, “Medieval bodies in the material world: gender, stigma and the body,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester 1994) 43–61, 53.

9 Amanda Richardson, “Gender and Space in English Royal Palaces c. 1160–c. 1547: A Study in Access Analysis and Imagery,” Medieval Archaeology 47 (2003) 131–165.

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brief of this article. I have two points. First, there is a strong current in scholarship to see encoded in the design and layout of the physical structures people occupy norma-tive ideas that seek to segregate the sexes, to restrict women’s movement, and to asso-ciate women with the private and the domestic. Second, the evidence upon which this rests is often both slight and fragile. Indeed there must be a concern that ideology and theory have sometimes prompted scholars to find what they are looking for. Thus As-ton’s rather simplistic model of gender-division within English parish churches has been challenged by Katherine French’s more nuanced reading of the evidence, but in any case one may wonder how far the evidence for the placement of pews, a phe-nomenon almost unknown before the fifteenth century, can inform us about earlier practice.10 Gilchrist’s access analysis is demonstrated using a ground plan for Leiston Abbey, a male house, alongside a plan of Burnham Abbey, a house of nuns. Whereas the ruins of Leiston comprise both the church and the full range of cloistral buildings, those at Burham essentially consist only of the east cloistral range. It follows that an access analysis of the Burnham site must rest on a rather high degree of surmise.11

My purpose is not to dismiss important pioneering scholarship, merely to sound a note of caution. We should, moreover, note Gilchrist’s important observation that gender segregation may be more marked at higher social levels. Religious houses and royal palaces are precisely the places we should most expect to find normative gender ideologies being played out. Indeed, the architecture and spatial arrangements become themselves vehicles by which normative values are disseminated. We should not, however, mistake this for evidence of actual practice, which may be more complex. Kim Phillips has indeed made the case that aristocratic women were socialized to be able to engage with the opposite sex whilst guarding their sexual honor; physical boundaries did not of themselves control or determine gender interaction.12 If, how-ever, we look beyond religious houses, royal palaces or even castles—and hence be-yond the most immediate influence of clerical or aristocratic ideologies of gender—then the influence of such ideologies on the design and layout of homes surely dimin-ishes. Borrowing from the medieval understanding of the tripartite ordering of society, if we move from those who fight and those who pray to consider those who labor, then we need to consider gender ideologies more immediately pertinent to peasant or bour-geois society.

10 Katherine L. French, “The Seat under Our Lady: Gender and Seating in Late Medieval English Parish

Churches,” Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany, NY 2005) 141–160. One of the anonymous readers for this article pointed out canon 1262 §1 of the Codex Iuris Canonici of 1917 which approves segregation of the sexes in church where this had been long-established practice (“congruenter antiquae disciplinae”), but the issue is not whether spatial segregation of the sexes in churches occurred in some historic contexts—it clearly did—but whether it did specifically in later medieval England.

11 Access analysis is dependent on the ability to detect patterns of movement through doorways, but where stonework has been completely robbed—even at the level of foundations—the location of doorways can at best only be surmised. Confidence in Gilchrist’s findings are not enhanced by the accompanying figure 68 which suggests that access to the deep space of the nuns’ dormitory commenced from the guest hall located in the now totally destroyed west range. Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture (n. 7 above) figs. 67 and 68, 164–165.

12 Kim Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester 2003) 94–97.


My analysis begins with a late fifteenth-century text known to modern audiences as “The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband”, a title lent to it by its mid nineteenth-century editors.13 It survives uniquely in a manuscript volume probably originally in the possession of a London mercantile family.14 My reason for turning to this compara-tively obscure, non-canonical text of precious little literary merit is that it has aroused some interest from historians of English peasant society. Barbara Hanawalt, Judith Bennett, and most recently Jane Whittle have all seized upon “The Ballad” as a valu-able social historical text. Whittle uses “The Ballad” alongside some later texts, in-cluding Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry, to document the range of work activities in which peasant women might be engaged.15 Bennett likewise deploys “The Ballad” to problematize the economic roles of males and females in a later medieval peasant context. It is, however, Hanawalt’s use of this text that interests me here. Hanawalt’s purpose is subtly different. She deploys the text as evidence for her model of separate, but complementary gender spheres which are apparently neatly illustrated by “The Ballad”: the eponymous husbandman plows in the fields outside, but his wife stays in the house.16

Peasant society was largely illiterate; we can find plenty of sources about peasants, but it is much harder to find sources attributed to peasants, let alone actually authored by peasants. “The Ballad,” however, purports to be just such a text; it offers an appar-ent window onto peasant society and its values from within. It is a rhyming verse nar-rative that contains within it a narrator figure who advises:

Lystyn good serrys, bothe yong and olde, By a good howsbande thys tale shal be tolde (lines 9–10)

The text when read aloud—and much medieval reading was a social activity in which texts were read aloud—wants us to believe that we are listening to a peasant narrating a “tale” about a peasant couple. Indeed the auditors are invited to imagine themselves engaging in an aural peasant culture with the perennial theme of competition between the sexes. The “goodman wold to the plow” (line 18), we are told, but he asks his wife to ensure that his dinner be ready on his return. Unfortunately, though “She was a good huswyfe, curteys and heynd/ … he was an angry man, and sone wold be tenyd” (lines 13–14). Consequently, when he returns from work to find his food is not yet ready, he loses his temper. Their angry exchange of words, however, prompts some

13 “The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband” was edited in Reliquiae Antiquae: Scraps From Ancient Manu-scripts, Illustrating Chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language, ed. Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, 2 vols. (London 1841–1843) 2.196–199. A modern edition is in The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI, 2002) published electronically at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm.

14 The manuscript collected together a fairly diverse range of texts including some female saints’ lives, some romances, various prayers, a conduct text, a school text, and an early list of wardens and bailiffs of the city of London: ibid. n. to lines 1–8; Rhiannon Purdie, “Sexing the Manuscript: The Case for Female Own-ership of MS Chetham 8009,” Neophilologus 82.1 (1998) 139–148.

15 Jane Whittle, “Housewives and Servants in Rural England, 1440–1650: Evidence of Women’s Work from Probate Documents,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 15 (2005) 63–64, 51–75.

16 Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (New York 1987) 116, 118; Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound (n. 4 above) 141. Hanawalt uses “The Ballad” illustratively and not as an important plank in her thesis. See n. 5 above.


interesting observations about their various work activities. The goodman tells his wife:

I wolde thou shuldes alle day go to plowe with me, To walke in the clottes that be wette and mere, Than sholdes thou wytt what it were a plowman to bee. (lines 30–32)

She in response offers a veritable catalogue of tasks that occupy her from early in the morning to late at night, the context of her complaint “I have mor to doo then I doo may” (line 34). Indeed, even through the night her sleep is interrupted for “wakyng with our cheylde” (line 45). The narrator-figure for this story explains that his concern is to get men to be more appreciative of how hard their womenfolk work and the goodwife’s litany of activities—brewing, baking, weaving, milking, dairying, prepar-ing flax, tending poultry, caring for livestock and children as well as preparing food and other household chores—serves to make the point. All these are tasks that can be independently documented as quintessentially women’s work.17 The goodman, how-ever, needs more persuading. He challenges his wife over the demands of her work by pointing out that brewing and baking are not daily chores, but something that she does only fortnightly. He goes on to assert, “Alle thys wold a good howsewyfe do long ar het were prime” (l. 78). He concludes by inviting the goodwife to swap roles for the day: “Therffor, dame, make thee redy, I warne thee, anone, omorow with my lade to the plowe thou shalt gone; ... ” (lines 81–82)

The text breaks off before this role reversal has been fully followed through—the narrator demands a drink of ale before continuing, but this is apparently not forth-coming. Nevertheless, we are left in little doubt as to its outcome. The goodwife is seen to pre-prepare some of the tasks her husband must perform—a sort of damage limitation exercise—and the poem ends with her going off to plow with the lad and thus spending the day out in the fields. Whereas the wife’s plowing we may presume is accomplished successfully, the husband’s housewifery will prove a disaster. In this way the goodman will at last learn to appreciate his wife.

The narrative lends itself to the sort of separate spheres argument that Hanawalt has borrowed from a nineteenth-century bourgeois gender ideology—men go out to work, whereas women are home makers.18 This, however, is to confuse the normative ideol-ogy that underpins the text for evidence of social practice. It is to mistake its contrived rusticity for social realism. The spatial divide set up by the husband going out to the fields to plow and later returning home to find his dinner not yet ready is a narrative device; only in this way can the goodman claim that his wife in fact spends her day

17 P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and York-

shire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford 1992) 104–149; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1600 (Cambridge 2005) 72–75, 145–156, 182–190, 196–198, 212–225.

18 In fact the validity of the separate spheres model even for 19th-c. social practice has been questioned. See Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal 36.2 (1993) 383–414.


chatting (“janglynge”) with her neighbors.19 The husband’s constructed ignorance is actually undercut by his later observation, already noticed, that his wife only brews and bakes periodically. The tasks the wife performs, moreover, repeatedly take her outside the house—and rather further beyond the house than is implied by Hanawalt’s ill-defined phrase “in and around the home.”20 Taking geese to pasture or milking cows and leading them to the field in fact suggests a spatial division of labor much more akin to Martine Segalen’s brilliant evocation of nineteenth-century French peas-ant society.21 We may go on. The fictive nature of “The Ballad” creates a palpably unreal world in which the goodman goes off to plow as if plowing could be a year-round activity. At the same time the text deliberately attributes to the goodwife only those activities that were done exclusively by women. Invisible here is her assistance at the hay and grain harvests, activities crucial to the peasant economy, but which fit neither with the specifically seasonal activity of plowing, nor the separate spheres model of labor.

It is here that the normative agenda underpinning the “The Ballad” is exposed. A modern audience may find amusing the idea of the goodwife going off to plow—and apparently plowing well—but a contemporary audience would have found the notion funny because absurd; plowing was one of a small number of tasks very specifically reserved to men.22 The plough and plowing, moreover, have deep cultural resonances with the male member and the sexual act.23 St. Kunigunde indeed was exonerated from a charge of adultery by walking barefoot over ploughshares that had been heated red-hot.24 Such observations reinforce the sense in which the goodwife’s actions take us to an upside down world contrary to the “natural,” divinely sanctioned order. In a well-governed household, the text implies, husband and wife will know their roles. Indeed this is the legacy of the Fall of man. Whereas women must bear children, men must till the soil. As the famous slogan of the Peasants’ Revolt succinctly phrases it, “Adam delved and Eve span.” A long tradition of visual representations effectively elaborates on this leitmotif. In the Holkham Bible Picture Book (London, British Li-brary, Add. MS 47682), for example, the still naked couple labor at their respective tasks, but Eve is clearly contained within a round arched hollow, whereas Adam works out in the open.25 The (only slightly) subliminal text is that God assigned separate gen-

19 This of course plays to contemporary misogynistic notions about women’s supposed propensity to “jangle” and visit neighbors: cf. G.R. Owst, Literature and the Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge 1933) 386–389.

20 Cf. Goldberg, “The Public and the Private,” (n. 5 above) 80–82. 21 Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century

(Oxford 1983) esp. 78–154. 22 R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the later Middle Ages: the Ford Lectures for 1973 and Related

Studies (Oxford 1975) 101. Women might of necessity direct the plough, but it was men alone that held the plough.

23 Cf. David Lorenzo Boyd, “Seeking ‘Goddes Pryvetee’: Sodomy, Quitting and Desire in The Miller’s Tale” Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Rob-inson, ed. Peter Stuart Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto 1998) 251–253; Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio (Toronto 2006) 93.

24 Roman Hankeln, “‘Properization’ and formal changes in high medieval saints’ offices: the offices for Saints Henry and Kunigunde of Bamberg,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 10.1 (2003) 3–22, 15.

25 London, BL, Add. MS 47682, fol. 4v. The accompanying text does not allude to Eve’s spatial loca-tion, but Michelle Brown, commenting on this scene, also observes that “Eve sits in a cave-like component


der roles and separate spatial spheres; only the first has any Scriptural authority in the Genesis account.26

“The Ballad” thus reflects contemporary and apparently hegemonic understandings of the relationship between gender and space. For Hanawalt, working primarily from the evidence of coroners’ rolls, these understandings also coincide with social prac-tice.27 So our son of Adam, the goodman of the poem, goes off to plough whilst his wife cares for the children, the livestock, cooks the meals, makes cloth for household needs and so on. As we have seen, peasant men and women may well have performed some or all these tasks, but the poem artfully offers only an imperfect and selective description of work activities intended to fit a postlapsarian gender ideology. This, I would argue, is not in fact a peasant ideology, just as “The Ballad” is not a peasant text. It is a bourgeois text about peasants. Within the context of a London merchant’s compilation, the text indeed becomes not so much a vehicle that uses humor to com-municate a serious message, but rather a place where a mercantile audience can laugh at country bumpkins. The rustic couple that are the subject of “The Ballad” are in fact a parody of a Scriptural text.

The poem describes the goodwife as “a good huswyfe, curteys and heynd” (line 13) Such a description prompts the poem’s audience to think of the virtuous wife of the Book of Proverbs. It is this woman that the poem clearly references. In the language of the Douay Rheims translation of the Book of Proverbs:

She hath sought wool and flax, and hath wrought by the counsel of her hands … And she hath risen in the night, and given a prey to her household, and victuals to her maidens ... She hath put out her hand to strong things, and her fingers have taken hold of the spindle ... She hath made for herself clothing of tapestry: fine linen, and purple is her covering ... She hath looked well to the paths of her house, and hath not eaten her bread idle. (Proverbs 31.13, 15, 19, 22, 27)28

The good wife is herself introduced with the rhetorical question: “Who shall find a valiant woman? far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of her. The heart of her husband trusteth in her, and he shall have no need of spoils” (Proverbs 31.10–11).29 The narrator within “The Ballad” also seeks to praise the virtuous woman. In order to do so, he tells of a husband who fails to value or trust his wife. The narrator here is no Solomon, neither is the good wife clothed in “fine linen, and purple” (Proverbs 31.22) nor the mistress of maidens—“servant had she none” (line 22). A later fifteenth-cen-tury London mercantile audience, however, in laughing at—and so distancing them-

in the landscape”: Michelle P. Brown, “The Commentary,” The Holkham Bible Picture Book: A Facsimile (London 2007) 34.

26 In the Latin of the Vulgate, God said to Adam, “in sudore vultus tui vesceris pane” and to Eve, “multiplicabo aerumnas tuas et conceptus tuos in dolore paries filios et sub viri potestate eris et ipse dominabitur tui”: Gen. 3.16, 19.

27 See n. 5 above. 28 The same verses in the Vulgate read: “quaesivit lanam et linum et operata est consilio manuum sua-

rum ... et de nocte surrexit deditque praedam domesticis suis et cibaria ancillis suis ... manum suam misit ad fortia et digiti eius adprehenderunt fusum ... stragulam vestem fecit sibi ... considerat semitas domus suae et panem otiosa non comedet.”

29 The Vulgate reads: “mulierem fortem quis inveniet procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius confidit in ea cor viri sui et spoliis non indigebit.”


selves from—this fictive peasant couple may have imagined themselves as closer to this Scriptural ideal of the well-ordered household. The mistress of such a household would indeed have worn fine clothes and had female servants under her charge. Her standing in society, and that of her husband and household moreover, would have been bolstered by her reputation as a virtuous wife and capable household manager. It is in precisely this sort of London mercantile context, for example, that Felicity Riddy has suggested the conduct text “How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter” was used by mistresses to socialize their servant girls, some of whom would be rural migrants.30 Such servants, I suggest, would be deemed to have been fully assimilated into urban mores when they had learnt to join in the laughter provoked by a reading of “The Ballad.”

The reading I have just offered challenges the view that “The Ballad” has much to tell us about social practice in respect of gender and space in the countryside. Its very conservative gender ideology, clerical in origin, may nevertheless reflect something of the anxieties of well-to-do householders and civic élites towards the end of the fif-teenth century.31 I now wish to explore some other sources for peasant and urban com-munities. In particular I am interested as an historian to try and marry evidence for the use of space from a variety of documentary sources with evidence for the houses peo-ple occupied. In short, I want to understand how far women spent their time in the home and men outside. The evidence for later medieval peasant houses is less sub-stantial than for town houses and tends to be concentrated towards the latter part of our period.32 For both urban and rural contexts, however, the houses of the better off are disproportionately represented and the houses of the poor hardly at all.33 This last is true even of the archaeological record.34 Evidence for the furnishings of houses is no easier. Little in the way of furnishings has survived, though a certain amount has been recovered archaeologically.35 Wills recording possessions provide clues, but they do

30 Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71.1

(1996) 66–86, 85. 31 Cf. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “Local Change and Community Control in England, 1465–1500,”

Huntington Library Quarterly 49.3 (1986) 219–242; P. J. P. Goldberg, “Coventry’s ‘Lollard’ programme of 1492 and the making of Utopia,” Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, ed. Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones (Cambridge 2001) 97–116.

32 Sarah Pearson’s tabulation and analysis of the dendrochronological evidence for samples of rural ver-nacular and of urban buildings suggest a higher proportion of urban buildings dating to before the era of the Black Death than is true of rural vernacular buildings. The majority of the latter date from after the middle of the 15thc. Pearson argues, “that this reflects a real state of affairs among surviving buildings is extremely likely, for projects aimed at understanding the chronological development of vernacular building in several regions have now taken place, and researchers tend to make a point of dating what they suspect are the earliest survivors in their region”: Sarah Pearson, “The Chronological Distribution of Tree-Ring Dates, 1980–2001: An Update,” Vernacular Architecture 32 (2001) 68–69.

33 Lady Row, Goodramgate, York, which was built in the earlier 14th c. to provide rents towards a chan-try in the neighboring church, is sometimes used to illustrate inexpensive, low-status housing (cf. Jane Grenville, Medieval Housing [London 1997] 190–192), but rental evidence would suggest many people made do with rather cheaper properties that do not survive.

34 The underlying problem is that archaeology of rural areas cannot readily identify smaller structures as houses and these may be interpreted instead as farm buildings or even detached kitchens.

35 Wooden furnishings rarely survive, though numbers of chests are extant, mostly because they came to be used in churches. Numbers of these may have been domestic in origin and passed to churches as gifts or bequests. See for example Charles Tracy, English Medieval Furniture and Woodwork (London 1988) 173–


not normally locate items spatially and are rare for peasant testators before the end of our period. Inventories, particularly probate inventories, represent perhaps the best source, but these are not abundant and are again rather more common for the aristoc-racy and better off townsfolk.36 What follows, therefore, can only be a modest contribution to a still developing field of study.

Peasant houses were built variously of timber, stone, and cob (mud and straw), were of various sizes, and conformed to different plans.37 My concern here is merely to sketch some broader patterns since my focus is the gendered use rather than the precise form or materiality of space. Particularly in the pre-plague era and over a much longer period in the upland, pastoral areas of the north and the west of England, the longhouse is widely found. Here the building was divided in half by a centrally located entrance door. This provided dwelling space around an open hearth in one half of the building whereas the other half could be used to house livestock. The north and west-ern half of the country (and much of Wales) was also characterized by a tradition of cruck construction which extended throughout the later Middle Ages.38 The technol-ogy effectively determined both the width and the height of the finished structure; cruck-framed houses allowed little room for an upper storey and the central fireplace was ventilated only by a louver in the roof, so making the living space rather smoky.39

In the south and east of the country the longhouse was displaced by housing re-served only for human habitation, though more substantial peasants might have one or more agricultural buildings, including a barn, in addition to the dwelling house ar-ranged around a yard. Most living accommodation, however, appears to have been rather limited. This region roughly corresponds with the extent of base cruck con-struction, a form of timber structure that seems to have been largely abandoned within a decade or so of the Black Death.40 Most houses were probably two or three bays in

199; Derek Sherlock, Suffolk Church Chests, Suffolk Institute for Archaeology and History (2008). In terms of archaeology, ceramics tend to survive comparatively well. The same is true of leather from waterlogged sites. Metalwork, particularly the fittings of wooden furnishings, may also survive, albeit much corroded.

36 There are two principal collections of 14th- and 15th-c. probate inventories, viz. those contained within the probate collections of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (TNA, PROB 2) which are very heav-ily skewed towards the last decade of the 15th c. (and beyond) and a more chronologically extensive collec-tion associated with the diocese of York, which last has been published in (a not entirely trustworthy) trans-lation: Philip M. Stell, trans., Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1350–1500, The Archaeology of York, Historical Sources for York Archaeology after AD1100 2/3 (York 2006). Numbers of other invento-ries of household goods also survive, including inventories of goods confiscated by the crown (TNA, E 154) though these are skewed towards very high status individuals.

37 Monograph publications on medieval peasant houses include Maurice Barley, Houses and History (London 1986) 30–57, 145–166; Grenville, Medieval Housing (n. 33 above) 23–65, 121–126; Matthew Johnson, Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape (London 1993) esp. 28–62; Matthew Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (Harlow 2010) 20–86. In addition there are several regional studies (see n. 65 below) and a substantial article literature.

38 Crucks are shaped timbers erected in pairs, each pair cut from a single tree. The bottom end of each cruck usually rests on a pad stone or on stone foundations, the top end bending over to abut the top of its pair so forming an arch-shaped structure. For the distribution of cruck-framed structures, see N. W. Alcock, “The Distribution and Dating of Crucks and Base Crucks,” Vernacular Architecture 33 (2002) 67–70.

39 This does scant justice, however, to the possibility of quite substantial and clearly prestigious cruck houses such as those that Richard Suggett has described for the Welsh Marches: Richard Suggett, Houses and History in the March of Wales: Radnorshire 1400–1800 (Aberystwyth 2005).

40 In base cruck construction, the crucks are attached to a collar and do not meet at the apex. It follows that the width and the height of the building are less immediately determined by the size of the trees from


length, so one of these bays could have been divided off to create a separate chamber, but the main “hall”, to use the contemporary and still conventional terminology, would normally have functioned both as a living and a cooking space. More affluent families may have possessed a separate kitchen.

It is only during the course of the fourteenth century and more especially the fif-teenth that we start to find extant box framed structures, although we have good evi-dence for this technology in an urban context from at least the later thirteenth century. Such structures readily allowed for an upper floor and tend to be associated with a clearer demarcation of space and a somewhat greater provision of rooms, though again this is much more marked in towns than the countryside. Box framing is found throughout the country, though distinctive regional types can be observed. Here we may note, for example, the plethora of so-called Wealden houses found mostly in Kent and Sussex, though interestingly this building type was also adopted in towns over a much wider area, for example Coventry and even York. Such houses project a degree of affluence, but also provide accommodation for servants and allow space to be used in more specific ways than would be possible in structures with just one or two rooms.

The foregoing discussion does scant justice to the range and variety of recorded peasant buildings and notices only timber constructions. The bigger picture, however, is—perhaps unremarkably—that housing varied in form, size, and complexity in ways that must reflect the social diversity of peasant society, different regional traditions and agricultural practices, and change over time. I want first to consider how issues of gender and space were played out in peasant houses that seem mostly to have com-prised but one or two rooms. Although Segalen’s model of the spatial location of rural labor by sex must be used with circumspection—nineteenth-century France is not late medieval England—it suggests that men did indeed spend their working day largely outdoors. Women probably spent proportionately rather more time than men working indoors, but still spent much time outside. Various seasonal tasks such as weeding and reaping would have taken women outdoors through the working day. This is reflected in the numerous presentments of female seasonal workers under the Statue of Labor-ers. It is also reflected in the case of Lucy Broun who left home in Tollesby (Yorks. N.R.) during the harvest season implicitly to take advantage of the good wages that were on offer in the years immediately following the Black Death only to find on her return that her husband was living with another woman.41 Adolescent daughters who did not migrate to town to find employment in service may indeed often have worked outdoors minding livestock and poultry, milking and dairying. Collecting firewood, nuts and berries were perhaps particularly tasks for younger children.42 Childcare seems not to have kept women at home. Babies were left in cradles for periods of time and ambulant children seem regularly to have been sent outdoors for large parts of the

which the crucks are cut. Dating evidence is discussed in Alcock, “Distribution and Dating” (n. 38 above) 67.

41 Simon A. C. Penn, “Female Wage Earners in Late Fourteenth Century England,” Agricultural History Review 35.1 (1987) 1–14; York, Borthwick Institute for Archives (hereafter BI), CP.E.77.

42 This is suggested from presentations in manor court rolls: Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound (n. 4 above) 158–159.


day. Child minding in the home seems often to have been relegated to older sisters, young female babysitters or elderly women.43

The home then was not a significant workplace for either sex, though this was per-haps especially true of poorer peasant families. Nor was it necessarily a place for eat-ing. Poorer peasants, both male and female, would tend to rely in varying degrees on selling their labor and so would probably expect some of their meals from their employers. Certainly we know that in the labor-starved decades following the Black Death employers had to work harder to secure labor and the provision of cooked meals was a significant part of the inducement.44 Langland also famously commented on the new demand for hot food.45 For poorer peasants then the house starts to appear primarily a place of shelter and a place to sleep. Space within the house was thus essentially communal and not particularly gendered. Much of peasant life was in fact located outside the house, both in terms of work and in respect of leisure activities.

For the majority within peasant society the locus of leisure activity and socializing can be understood to be in the pub, in the church, in the manor house, and in the street. The 1307 testimony of Adam le Schirreve concerning an alleged miracle whereby Bishop Thomas Cantilupe posthumously revived Adam’s small daughter who had accidentally drowned vividly illuminates how socializing was communal rather than familial. Adam, who appears to have been a fairly prosperous peasant with livestock of his own, testified to how he and some hundred parishioners, both male and female and including children, went to a pub in the village one Sunday afternoon in spring. Some of the children subsequently wandered outside to play and “as was the custom,” the “younger folk, after having a drink ... formed a dance line and danced through the garden” of the pub whilst the “adults and older people” remained in the pub.46 Regular church services and church ales also represent communal activities as did parish guilds. The men of the community might play football together. We see this, for ex-ample, in a disputed marriage case dated 1422 where one Margaret Pyper recalled the time that the couple contracted as when the men of her village of Wistow play foot-ball.47

Shooting at butts, which was made compulsory as a consequence of the war with France, would also have represented a male communal and social activity. One Robert

43 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8.1 (1977) 1–22, 16–17; Goldberg, “Childhood and Gender,” (n. 5 above) 260.

44 Christopher Dyer, “Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: the Case of Harvest Workers,” Agricul-tural History Review 36.1 (1988) 21–37, 22, 29.

45 “Laborers þat haue no land to lyue on but hire handes / Deyneþ no1t to dyne a day ny1t olde wortes. / May no peny ale hem paie, ne no pece of bacoun, / But if it be fressh flessh ouþer fissh fryed ouþur ybake, / And pat chaud and plus chaud for chillynge of hire mawe.” Langland, Piers Plowman, B-text, passus 6, lines 307–311.

46 Translated in Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (Basingstoke 1997) 174–176. The Latin text reads, “ad quam tabernam venerunt dicta die dictus testis et Cecilia ejus uxor post nonam, et bene centum persone vel circa de dicta parochia ... et secundum modum et usum eorum juniores post potum semel acceptum posuissent se in chorea, et dictam choream duxissent per gardinum ... sed remansit cum aliis provectis et senibus in dicta taberna”: Acta Sanctorum, October, I, 610–611.

47 Judith M. Bennett, “Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Past and Pre-sent 134 (1992) 19–41; Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia 2001); BI, CP.F.133


Barbour, for example, testified to participating in shooting at butts with a large number of other men near Pocklington.48 Less exclusively male, but still in part social in func-tion, would have been the regular sessions of the manorial court taking place in the hall of the manor house. Lastly—though this does not claim to be an exhaustive list—we may cite local pilgrimage as yet another communal activity drawing upon both male and female villagers. On a feast day of the Virgin, for example, a mixed group of villagers dressed in their festival clothes and went to pray before a local image of the Virgin. They then went on to hear mass at Selby Abbey before returning home to spend the remainder of the day eating and drinking.49

For more prosperous peasants the picture is perhaps subtly different. Women may have spent more time in the home and consequently there may have been some asso-ciation between women and the home. The women of better-off households, like the goodwife of “The Ballad,” might engage periodically in brewing and perhaps weav-ing. Cooking for family members, for servants and for hired labor would have been a daily activity. Likewise well-to-do peasant families may have been more concerned to guard the reputation of their womenfolk and in particular to restrict the mobility of adolescent daughters. The evidence of marriage litigation from the Court of York is certainly suggestive of a significant level of parental and familial influence over the marriage of their daughters on the part of such peasants. To offer an extreme example, a presumably youthful Alice Belamy of Raskelf (Yorks., N.R.) was allegedly forced into marrying one Robert Thomson after her great uncle threatened to take her by the ears and throw her down a well if she refused.50 Parental vigilance over the chastity of their daughters is also indicated by the low proportion of leyrwite fines for sex outside of marriage associated with villein daughters from higher status families compared to those from poorer families.51 This then is an argument that the house was to a degree seen as women’s space and certainly that the hearth, over which cooking would have been done in the absence of a separate kitchen, and any work areas associated with brewing, spinning or weaving would have constituted women’s domain. The same would be true of dairying—making butter and cheese—and flax preparation, tasks that are sometimes suggested from utensils listed in probate inventories.52

Recently Jane Grenville, inspired by previous work by Matthew Johnson, has ar-gued that the hall of the peasant home constituted a space in which patriarchal social

48 Rymer, Foedera (London 1739) III, ii, 79; BI, CP.F.152. 49 BI, CP.F.240 50 BI, CP.E.85 (1362). Perhaps more typical was the marriage of Agnes Beleby to Robert Inkersole,

which was arranged between the two families. Only after Agnes’s father had agreed a dowry was it asked, “what Robert and Agnes sais in þis mater for in þame tow lies all”: BI, CP.F.242 (1466). I have discussed parental and familial involvement in peasant marriages at greater length in Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) 244–251.

51 Ibid. 208, 250. 52 Brewing utensils and brewhouses are frequently noticed in extant inventories (e.g., TNA, PROB 2/35)

as are spinning wheels (e.g., TNA, PROB 2/1). Dairying equipment is hard to identify since items such as tubs, pails, stools cannot be specifically identified with the dairy, but Thomas Sesson, who ran a flock of some200 sheep and a small herd of cattle, possessed a butter churn and four cheese vats: TNA, E 154/2/12. Robert Connyg (see below), who kept cattle, possessed a sieve for milk: Stell, trans., Probate Inventories (n. 36 above) 555. Tools such as heckles, combs, swinglestocks, etc. indicate linen production (e.g., Stell, trans., Probate Inventories (n. 36 above) 568, 644).


relations could be played out. She cites the tripartite division of the house into hall, services (food storage, preparation and cooking areas), and solar or bed chamber—the essential elements also found in the grander houses of manorial lords—as the spatial clues that underpin this reading of the hall’s function.53 This could suggest a rather different reading of the more well-to-do peasant home than that which I have just out-lined, although the two positions can be made compatible. Both understand higher-status peasant social relations as essentially patriarchal and we could refine the model to one where the hall is seen as male-controlled space, the services as female-con-trolled space, and the solar as shared space. Such a reading depends, however, on imagining a relatively clear distinction between a “low” service end and an opposite “high” end, beyond which a solar may be found, from excavated peasant buildings that are represented essentially by evidence for external walls, a hearth and a few pieces of pottery.54 To form a clearer picture of the gendered use of space, therefore, we need better evidence for the material culture and spatial arrangement of medieval peasant houses.

Field archaeology can be augmented by evidence from extant buildings and from probate and other inventories. Unfortunately extant peasant houses are uncommon before the later fourteenth century and all are subject to varying degrees of internal rearrangement, reconstruction, extension and alteration. What survives, moreover, is biased towards more substantial timber-framed constructions and so towards the most prosperous peasant households. The following discussion draws upon nine probate inventories in respect of peasant buildings from the period before 1450 and a further twenty-three for the period 1450–1499.55 Of these last, two relate to men who lived in rural communities and had a modest involvement in agriculture, but who appear pri-marily to have made their livelihood from the cloth trade.56 This sample does not pre-tend to be complete and is undoubtedly also skewed towards better-off peasants, but it

53 Jane Grenville, “Urban and rural houses and households in the late Middle Ages: a case study from

Yorkshire,” Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (Cambridge 2008) 109.

54 Ibid. 107–109. 55 I have elsewhere discussed a sample of some 100 late medieval probate inventories, heavily skewed

by reason of survival towards merchants and artisans, particularly from Yorkshire. This analysis forms the basis of some of what follows. For this article I have expanded my sample with a small group of inventories mostly from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury that reflect a variety of locales in southern England: P. J. P. Goldberg, “The fashioning of bourgeois domesticity in later medieval England: a material culture per-spective,” Medieval Domesticity, ed. Kowaleski and Goldberg (n. 53 above) 124–144; TNA, PROB 2/1, 4, 10, 35, 85, 86; TNA, E 154/2/12 (this last is undated, but probably belongs to the last years of the 15th c.); Cornish Wills 1342–1540, ed. Nicholas Orme, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series 50 (2007) 26, 41. It appears that numbers of more ephemeral items, e.g., ceramic vessels, do not appear in inventories and it is probable that some appraisers were more conscientious that others in the amount of detail they provided. Where items are inventoried by named rooms, it would be unwise to assume that these items necessarily always belonged to that room. Concerns have sometime been expressed that probate valuations are untrustworthy. The methodology that I have deployed below uses the relative values of different catego-ries of item and thus makes few demands on absolute values. For some useful discussions of probate inven-tories as a source (albeit for a later period) see Tom Arkell, “Interpreting Probate Inventories,” When Death Do Us Part: Understanding the Probate Records of Early Modern England ed. Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans, and Nigel Goose (Oxford 2000) 72–102; Mark Overton, “Prices from Probate Inventories,” ibid. 120–141.

56 Walter Mayow of Croscombe (Somerset) dated 1482, and Harry Bodiham of Goudhurst (Kent) dated 1490: TNA PROB 2/10, 35.


is an indicator of how rarely this essentially ephemeral source has survived before the early modern era. The sample is, however, sufficient to show certain patterns of mate-rial culture that are characteristically peasant that cannot be explained solely in terms of wealth. The principal structures, so far as these can be gleaned from the inventories, usually comprise either hall (containing cooking utensils) and chamber or hall, cham-ber and (presumably detached) kitchen. In contradistinction to bourgeois culture, peasant houses do not often contain cushions—symbolic of a concern for comfort—before the last decade of the fifteenth century and silver spoons—a form of conspicu-ous consumption—hardly at all. Both are common in town houses.57 A significant proportion of peasant wealth was invested in livestock, grain and farm tools; house-hold goods represented only about a quarter or less of the total value of a peasant’s moveable possessions.58 In respect of household goods cooking utensils, beds and bed-ding often appear to have accounted for the majority of expenditure, but rather more seems to have been expended on cooking utensils than on beds and bedding.59

The inventory of Robert Connyg, a prosperous mixed agriculturalist of Helperby, northwest of York, made in 1438, exemplifies this peasant pattern. Connyg’s live-stock, grain and farm equipment accounted for over eighty per cent of the valuation of his movables. Of his household possessions, more than seventy per cent of the value was in kitchen utensils and in beds in a ratio of 4:1. He had neither cushions nor silver spoons in a sparsely furnished house that corresponded to the archetypal tripartite model, viz., kitchen, hall, and chamber. The chamber comprised merely three beds and a chest, the hall little more than some tables and chairs. This then was a house that was arranged and furnished to serve the essential functions of eating and sleeping. There is no indication here that Connyg looked to make his home especially comfortable, a place to entertain, or a place to spend leisure time.

It may be that northern peasant homes were especially spartan. The 1417 inventory of John Reder of Soham (Cambs.) corresponds to the classic “peasant” model in that almost three-quarters of the total value of possessions worth just under ten pounds were accounted for by non-household items. These last included his flock of 140 sheep, but he also had a bullock and a couple of pigs. Reder’s house likewise com-prised the classic tripartite form of hall, parlor, and kitchen; the parlor functioned as a bed chamber. Nevertheless, and despite his limited resources—much more modest than those available to Connyg—his hall and parlor appear a little less bare. In part

57 Three prosperous southern peasant inventories from the 1490s, viz. Harry Bodiham of Goudhurst, Ed-

mund Cook of Basingstoke, and Richard Hychen of Basingbourn, all itemize both numbers of cushions and spoons: TNA, PROB 2/35, 85, 86. Neither spoons nor cushions appear to be itemized, however, in the late 15th-c. inventory of the equally prosperous Thomas Sesson of Milton-under-Wychwood: TNA, E 154/2/12. For a discussion of the cultural meanings of cushions and spoons, see Goldberg “The fashioning of bour-geois domesticity” (n. 55 above) 132–135.

58 An interesting departure from this pattern is Richard Hychen, whose 1494 inventory shows that some-what more than half his assets were tied to his house. Significantly Hychen, clearly a man of some prosper-ity who appears to have been heavily involved in growing wheat, is styled “yeoman” in the document: TNA, PROB 2/86.

59 Again, this is not true of Richard Hychen, whose beds and bedding were worth more than the contents of kitchen and buttery combined, and who possessed additional furnishings, clothing, and money in his house worth in total somewhat more than the total value of beds, bedding, and kitchen stuff combined: TNA, PROB 2/86.


this is an optical illusion since Connyg’s inventory, for example, merely lists three beds valued at 10s., whereas Reder’s carefully itemizes beds, sheets, coverlets, and four pillows, total value only 7s. 7d., but the mention of pillows is interesting and the valuation is both greater than that of the goods in the kitchen (5s. 7d.) and represents a rather higher proportion of his total worth than is true of Connyg. His possessions include pewterware and this again is indicative of a slightly greater sense of status than is true of the Connyg household.60 The 1446 inventory of John Rove of Boxford, a community in south Suffolk between Hadleigh and Sudbury, is again classic “peas-ant’ with three-quarters of the total value lying outside the house, mostly in the form grain, cattle, and horses. However, it likewise shows a little more interest in comfort: the chamber had four painted cloths; feather beds are specified, one with a red cover-ing and curtains; more is invested in beds and bedding than kitchen utensils. These then are homes that were perhaps a little more inviting as living spaces, but most in-vestment still lies outside the house in the form of livestock, grain and farm tools.

This peasant pattern may be set against a rather different bourgeois pattern. Whereas Connyg’s spartanly furnished house was focused first on the preparation and consumption of food and second on sleeping with little to suggest that the domestic space was used for recreational purposes or after dark, a roughly contemporary baker’s inventory from York—that of Thomas Overdo dated 1444—indicates a comfortably furnished hall that was used for eating, for entertaining, and for relaxation even out-side daylight hours.61 Overdo’s movables were of broadly similar worth to Connyg’s, but over seventy percent of their value was invested in household furnishings as against Connyg’s sixteen percent. Clearly the two men had very different priorities which gave their houses and how they were used rather different meanings. Connyg may not have used his home as a place of recreation or a place for entertaining, but this is not to imply that Connyg did not have leisure time or socialize, merely that these activities took place outside the home. For Thomas Overdo, on the other hand, they must frequently have been located in the home. This bourgeois model will be discussed at rather greater length in due course, but I wish first to explore a significant new development in well-to-do peasant housing that may suggest changing meanings and uses of space.

From the later fourteenth century we begin to find some more substantial timber-framed houses with upper floor accommodation and a clearer differentiation of space. It is my contention that these represent well-to-do peasant households that employed labor, including live-in life-cycle servants, and which may consequently have come closer to Grenville’s model.62 This was most marked by the later fifteenth century which saw, in Matthew Johnson’s words, “a sudden growth of housebuilding at the

60 TNA, PROB 2/1. The relative value of beds and bedding to kitchen items is perhaps overstated as

various dishes, etc. are itemized under “the hall” whereas all such utensils are listed under “kitchen” in Connyg’s inventory.

61 It is possible that Connyg made use of tallow candles would not show up in the inventory, but the ab-sence of candlesticks still seems worthy of remark.

62 Cf. Grenville, Medieval Housing (n. 33 above) 153–156.


level of medium- to small-sized farmhouses without crosswings.”63 My remarks echo Johnson’s thesis articulated in his 1993 study, Housing Culture.64 They are supported, as we will see, by the evidence of a very small sample of southern probate inventories I have thus far analyzed, but they represent an agenda for further research. Moreover, it may be that the sort of well built and comparatively spacious houses that Sarah Pearson has described for Kent, Matthew Johnson for Suffolk, or Colum Giles for the West Riding of Yorkshire were the product of, but also created the stage for hierarchal and gendered social relations necessitated by the presence of unrelated servants in the house both night and day, of day laborers at mealtimes, and of friends and neighbors of like social rank as periodic visitors and guests.65

The increasing numbers of more substantial rural houses enjoying upper floor ac-commodation over the course of the later fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries is no doubt the product of a range of factors, some of which I will now explore. In particular I want to highlight a set of economic considerations that were largely a product of the profound hemorrhaging of the population in the decades following the advent of plague in 1348–1349. Falling numbers had an immediate impact on the cost of waged labor, which rose markedly despite the government’s attempts to peg wages at pre-plague levels.66 In the slightly longer term, population contraction depressed demand for bread and hence grain; from the 1370s grain prices were beginning to fall in real terms. These twin factors—rising wage levels and falling grain prices—made arable husbandry unprofitable in some regions, particularly parts of Midland England that had only been profitable in the pre-plague era of low wages and high prices. This is reflected both in evidence for a movement of people away from some rural areas into towns and indeed the capital and, in the long term, in actual depopulation leading to the phenomenon of village desertion. At the same time a general upward movement in living standards for the majority as wages rose and rents paid on land fell as lords competed for tenants, coupled with falling food prices from the 1370s, prompted in-creased demand for a range of comparatively inexpensive goods and services. Con-sumption of non-imported cloth, basic furnishings, leather goods, metal cooking uten-sils, meat all rose, in turn stimulating demand inter alia for wool, hides and meat. The prosperity that underpins the construction of more substantial peasant houses during the fifteenth century follows from this. Suffolk, together with northern Essex, enjoyed particular prosperity from wool and woolen textiles, also reflected in the county’s fa-

63 Johnson, Housing Culture (n. 37 above) 51. Significantly the later 15th c. was characterized by rising

rural living standards primarily as a consequence of falling prices: Bruce M.S. Campbell, English Seignio-rial Agriculture 1250–1450 (Cambridge 2000) 5, fig. 1.01.

64 Johnson, Housing Culture (n. 37 above) 53–61. 65 Sarah Pearson, The Medieval Houses of Kent: An Historical Analysis (London 1994); Johnson, Hous-

ing Culture (n. 37 above) 44–62; Colum Giles, Rural Housing of West Yorkshire 1400–1830 (London 1986). In an excellent recent monograph on gender and space in early modern England that draws upon a range of sources, Amanda Flather argues that “the organisation of domestic space in rural and in urban middling households in early modern Essex underpinned patterns of integration, rather than separation, of the sexes during everyday life”: Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge 2007) 44.

66 Simon A. C. Penn and Christopher Dyer, “Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labor Laws,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 43.3 (1990) 356–376.


mous wool churches.67 Much the same would be true of the woolen districts of the Cotswolds, Somerset, and the south west. The West Riding likewise witnessed the growth a significant rural textile industry, but also iron working in the southern part of the county.68 Kent was by any measure a prosperous county in the later Middle Ages and the Weald come to enjoy significant textiles and iron-working industries.69 Evi-dence for the distribution of wealth in the later Middle Ages would further suggest prosperity in the Thames Valley and the south-west.70

These patterns are reflected in our small sample of probate inventories surviving from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Both Walter Mayow of Croscombe, a pros-perous woolen community between Wells and Shepton Mallet, whose inventory is dated 1482, and Harry Bodiham of the Kentish Wealden village of Goudhurst, whose inventory dates from 1490, were involved in the cloth trade.71 Bodiham seems to have particularly specialized in the retail of cloth imported from the Low Countries; the stock in his shop included cloth from Holland, Brabant, and Flanders, but also buck-ram and fustian. Mayow was a dyer and clothier. His goods included wool, cloth, and sheers in addition to woad to the value of £30. From the evidence of the spaces listed in the inventories, Bodiham’s house comprised hall, buttery, kitchen, chamber, and shop. Mayow, a much wealthier man, enjoyed a hall, parlor, pantry, kitchen, two chambers, a shop, a brewhouse, a dye house, and a stable. The parlor seems to have functioned as a bedchamber whereas one of the two (presumably upper-floor) cham-bers was used specifically for storage. Both men possessed silver spoons and cushions.

The inventories of peasant agriculturalists John Reder of Soham (Cambs.), dated 1417, and John Rove the younger, of Boxford, dated 1446, have already been dis-cussed. Neither of these earlier inventories listed either cushions or silver spoons, though Rove possessed a silver girdle and two silver rings in addition to a moderate amount of clothing. Among the latter’s furnishings a writing chair and counting board are noted. Both houses also contained spinning wheels.72 Rather more substantial are the houses and possessions of Edmund Cook of Basingstoke (Hants.) and Richard Hychen of Bassingbourn (Cambs.), whose in inventories are dated to some time in the 1490s and 1494 respectively.73 Both owned cushions and silver spoons, a dozen in the

67 Mark Bailey, Medieval Suffolk: An Economic and Social History, 1200–1500 (Woodbridge 2007) esp.

chaps. 9 and 11. 68 Alan R. H. Baker, “Changes in the Later Middle Ages,” A Historical Geography of England, ed. H. C.

Darby (Cambridge 1973) 222–226; Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge 1995) 19–28, 147–156; Goldberg Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) 47–48, 86–104, 137–149.

69 Baker, “Changes in the Later Middle Ages,” 228, 230; Michael Zell, Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge 1994) passim.

70 R. S. Schofield, “The geographical distribution of wealth in England, 1334–1649,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 18.3 (1965) 483–510, 506–509.

71 TNA, PROB 2/10 (Mayow), 35 (Bodiham). 72 TNA, PROB 2/1 (Reder), 2/4 (Rove). Frustratingly the arrangement of Rove’s inventory makes it hard

to locate many items spatially, so it is not possible to tell how far the location of the writing chair and counting board may have constituted a distinct male space or that of the spinning wheels women’s space.

73 TNA, PROB 2/85 (Cook) 86 (Hychen). See also n. 48 and n. 49 above. To these we may add that of Thomas Sesson of the Cotswold village of Milton-under-Wychwood, but this inventory, which probably dates to the end of the 15th c., lists possessions without division and does not identify separate rooms: TNA, E 154/2/12.


case of Cook, but two dozen in Hychen’s instance. Cook possessed over ten pounds worth of livestock, which included a flock of two hundred sheep. He also had more modest amounts of wheat in his barn and growing in his fields and a shop that stocked canvas and “crescloth” (a linen cloth).74 His house comprised hall, buttery, kitchen, two chambers, and a shop together with a barn and a stable. More elaborate still was the home of Richard Hychen, who is described as a yeoman. In addition to a hall, but-tery, kitchen, and bakehouse, five separate chambers are recorded. The “little cham-ber” was for storage, but four others were all bedchambers. Of these, the first listed was clearly the principal chamber of the master and mistress; money, the silver spoons, and quantities of clothing were all noted here. The third listed—after the “little chamber”—was “another chamber.” This was followed by a “loft chamber” and fi-nally—and significantly—the “servants’ chamber.”75

The growth in demand for the products of pastoralism, both wool and livestock, to-gether with an associated growth of rural industries around textile production and leather, wood, and metal working created new demands on labor at a time of high wages. To no small extent this need was most effectively met by the employment of male and female adolescents and young adults as live-in servants, a phenomenon that demographic historians dub life-cycle service. For pastoralists servants represented inexpensive—because paid primarily in terms of bed and board—and highly depend-able labor. Servants, unlike day labor, were normally contracted for a year at a time, but because they lived with their employers they were potentially available whenever needed, a distinct advantage since livestock need tending all year round, but during lambing or calving, might require attention through the night. Female servants were in particular demand in pastoral regions since dairying (both cows and sheep), carding, and spinning were quintessentially women’s work.76 Artisanal households associated with rural industries—many of which would probably have also engaged additionally in agriculture—may well have drawn more readily on male servants, but would again have benefitted from a reliable and inexpensive supply of labor.

It was this exposure of the household to external scrutiny and this coming together of persons of different social rank and gender that differentiated these higher-status peasant (including artisanal) households from their poorer, but perhaps more egalitar-ian neighbors. It is no doubt that from this level of society that we find articulated an increasingly conservative morality and gender ideology, in part perhaps because of anxieties generated by the housing of unmarried and unrelated persons of both sexes. This is perhaps the context for the fashion for maidens’ guilds found, for example, in the south west of the country.77 Peasant girls were socialized to insist upon their fa-

74 A. D. T., “‘Honie Presse’: ‘Ceife’: ‘Crescloth’”, Notes and Queries s12-VII, Issue 119 (1920) 70. 75 The inventory of Thomas Sesson (n. 57 above) notes coverlets for servants: TNA, E 154/2/12. 76 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) chap. 4; idem, “What was a Servant?” Con-

cepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthews (Wood-bridge 2000) 1–20; Whittle, “Housewives and Servants” (n. 15 above) 51–74.

77 Cf. n. 31above. For maidens’ guilds see Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia 2008) chap. 4, esp. 137–146.


ther’s blessing before agreeing to marry.78 At parochial visitations in the early six-teenth century we even find wives reported by their neighbors for conceiving their first child before their marriage had been solemnized and consequently made to do pen-ance.79 The more substantial housing of this socially conservative peasant élite would have served both to accommodate servants and provide separate sleeping areas for unrelated persons of the opposite sex.80 It would have allowed the hall a more specific function as a living space rather than a general purpose space used for cooking, work activities, storage, and perhaps sleeping, as much as eating.81 These new spatial arrangements not only responded to changing accommodation needs and to rising so-cial aspirations, they would also have encoded and helped create new understandings of age, gender, and status hierarchy and social interaction and new ways of thinking about space and how it was used. As we shall shortly see, these new understandings have some parallels with those of the upper levels of town society.

Just as we can describe both a “peasant” model and what we might term an emer-gent and more hierarchical “yeoman” model in respect of the use of space in and be-yond the house, so a similarly socially diverse pattern in respect of the gendering of space applies within an urban context. Here the distinction is between the accommo-dation of the poor, the houses of artisans, and the houses of an urban élite.82 We per-haps know comparatively more about later medieval town houses. In addition to exca-vation evidence and extant buildings, we have hundreds of wills and a larger, albeit still modest number of probate inventories.83 The research potential is also consider-able since extant property deeds, rentals, wills, even perhaps probate inventories and

78 E.g., Elena Couper of Welton (near Hull) who was betrothed to one John Wystowe against her par-

ents’ wishes, nevertheless pleaded for her father’s consent that they might be married: BI, CP. 280 (1491). Cf. P. J. P. Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England c. 1275–1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester 1995) 119 (no. 29b). Diana O’Hara offers a similar picture of significant levels of familial influence over the marriages of their daughters for a slightly later period: “‘Ruled by my friends’: aspects of marriage in the diocese of Canterbury, c. 1540–1570,” Continuity and Change 6.1 (1991) 9–41.

79 Goldberg, ed., Women in England (n. 78 above) 120 (nos. 30d, 31b). Cf. also Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge 1998) 68ff.

80 The yeoman Richard Hychen’s house had a chamber specifically designated in his inventory as the servants’ chamber: TNA, PROB 2/86. Formal division of houses into separate rooms through the construc-tion of solid walls is only part of the story. Much more difficult to discern from the archaeological record is the use of semi-permanent structural divisions through the use of wooden partitions. Perhaps more impor-tant, if invisible in terms of extant structures, are the use of moveable screens and hangings.

81 Both Edmund Cook and Richard Hychen had a painted cloth in their halls, suggestive of a degree of decoration as well as the comfort indicated by the numbers of seats and presence of cushions: TNA, PROB 2/85, 86.

82 For a useful recent discussion of the diversity of urban housing and its relationship to economic stantus see Sarah Pearson, “Medieval Houses in English Towns: Form and Location,” Vernacular Architecture 40 (2009) 1–22. Pearson rightly notes (7) that the scholarly literature has tended to focus on high-status urban housing with open halls, that is halls undivided by an upper floor and open to the roof, whereas in fact there were many houses—and not specifically the houses of the poor—that did not follow such an arrangement.

83 The following discussion draws upon 52 probate and related inventories ranging in date from 1291–1292 to 1449 and a further 20 which relate to the period 1450–1499. The 19 earliest, taken from a subsidy record for King’s Lynn, do not record the internal division of houses into rooms, but many of the later documents allow possessions to be located spatially. Most of these later inventories relate to York or Lon-don, but a number pertain variously to Beverley, Exeter, King’s Lynn, Northallerton, Norwich, Scarbor-ough, and Southampton: Goldberg, “Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity,” (n. 55 above) table 6.1, 139–144; TNA, PROB 2/39, 40.


deposition evidence from ecclesiastical court cases may coincide with extant build-ings.84 Despite the comparative richness of evidence, it is apparent that, as for peasant society, the evidence of extant buildings is significantly skewed towards the upper echelons of town society. The same is true to a degree of the scholarly literature. Thus John Schofield’s major study of London’s medieval houses, a work that necessarily relies heavily on archaeology and the unique Treswell surveys of the early seventeenth century, seems much more interested in very high status buildings than how the ma-jority lived.85 Even the much cited example of Lady Row, Goodramgate in York, though a very rare survival of modest accommodation, hardly represents the resi-dences of the urban poor.86

There are both economic and gender dimensions to this pattern. High-status trades—merchant, mercer, draper and the like—tend to be centrally located and asso-ciated with large houses that contained numbers of live-in servants. We see this in the York parishes of St Crux, All Saints, Pavement, and St Martin, Coney Street; in Hull (now High) Street, the principal thoroughfare running adjacent to the river in Kingston upon Hull; and in the Bailey Lane ward of Coventry. Poorer people tended to live in marginal or suburban areas and in streets running off and behind more affluent neighborhoods.87 The remarkably good run of rentals for the sizable urban estate of the York vicars choral, for example, lists numbers of tenants paying minimal rents on the corner of Aldwark and St. Andrewgate, an area just inside the walls to the north of the city. Archaeology shows that properties here were small cottages.88 At the end of the fourteenth century at least, a significant proportion of these tenants were women. The bynames of some of these female tenants associate them with such trades as seamstress and cook, but act book evidence shows that some were also sex workers. We can in fact identify right-light districts as part of a pattern of occupational zon-ing.89 Elsewhere, as for example Grimsby Lane in Hull, we find groups of single women living in close proximity no doubt by reason of social solidarity and security.

Broadly speaking we can distinguish the larger, more substantial properties such as that exemplified by the prosperous York baker, Thomas Overdo, noted earlier, whose 1444 probate inventory details the contents of a hall, several, chambers, kitchen, brew-house and bakehouse, and outhouse cum stable, from the very basic and limited ac-commodation of the poor in small cottages and shared “rents.”90 These last often lacked fireplaces. We may speculate as to the use of portable braziers and the like, but the effect must have been to have placed marked constraints on both cooking and

84 The coincidence of such a full range of sources is probably only possible for Canterbury and for York, but a number of sources and extant buildings survive for a number of other towns.

85 John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven 1995). 86 See n. 29 above. 87 I have discussed this at greater length in Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) 305–

318. 88 Ibid. 313; Sarah Rees Jones, “Historical background of the Aldwark / Bedern Area,” R. A. Hall, H.

McGregor, and M. Stockwell, Medieval Tenements in Aldwark, and Other Sites, The Archaeology of York 10/2 (1988) 56–58.

89 Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) 151–152. 90 I have chosen Thomas Overdo because the date of his inventory and the total value of his possessions

are similar to that of the husbandman Robert Connyg discussed earlier. Overdo’s inventory is translated in Stell, trans., Probate Inventories (n. 36 above) 565–567.


heating. This would have encouraged people to use their accommodation only of ne-cessity; like—or perhaps more so—their rural counterparts, they must have sought cooked food and warmth elsewhere.91 Many laborers who inhabited these properties, both single persons and couples with families, would in fact often have found em-ployment—and hence have spent the working day—in the houses of the traders and manufacturers of whom Overdo is an exemplar. This would have been less true of numbers of poor women piece-workers—spinsters, seamstresses, dressmakers—though the numerous retailers of second-hand goods, the street traders or hucksters and the like would have spent much of the working day outdoors. Spinsters and seam-stresses may also have preferred to work in doorways or just outside their buildings since this would have afforded better light and the possibility of social interaction with other such women and passers by.92

As we have already seen in a rural context, merchants and artisans like Overdo would have had to accommodate not just his own immediate family of wife and younger children, but also live-in servants and, during the working day, waged labor. His house would thus have required the additional space to provide separate sleeping room for servants and adequate cooking facilities to feed numbers of employees. But Overdo’s house, unlike the better-off peasant’s, was not solely about feeding workers and providing beds. It was much more evidently a place of comfort and recreation. Overdo’s inventory lists a dozen cushions in his hall, which also contained inter alia wall hangings, various bankers or textile bench coverings, several basins and ewers, a chafing dish for keeping food warm, gaming tables, and an aumbry (or cupboard) in addition to a settle and a table. Also inventoried in the hall were a number of candle-sticks, though implicitly such items could be moved from room to room. Overdo’s comfortably furnished hall was complemented by similarly well furnished chambers, kitchen, brewhouse, and bakehouse. Overdo’s household possessions outweighed the value of the goods and livestock (a cow and almost certainly at least one horse) in his stable in a ratio of about 3:1, a proportion broadly in line with other urban artisanal inventories.93 As was true of other well-to-do townsfolk, his chambers contained feather beds, bed curtains, pillows, numerous sheets (including sheets for servants), chests, and a painted cloth. Some urban chambers contained devotional imagery and may have provided a private space for spiritual contemplation. They may also have provided a place where women could entertain their female friends.94 In general the bourgeois household seems to have expended more on beds and bedding than on

91 Martha Carlin, “Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England,” Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London 1998) 27–52.

92 Peter and Jennifer Clark, “The Social Economy of the Canterbury Suburbs: the evidence of the census of 1563,” Studies in Modern Kentish History, ed. Alan Detsicas and Nigel Yates (Maidstone 1983) 65–86, 80; Flather, Gender and Space (n. 65 above) 83–84.

93 Goldberg, “Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity,” (n. 55 above) 129–131and table 6.1, 139–144. 94 E.g., John Collan, goldsmith, of York had a hanging cloth with an image of Our Lady of Mercy in his

principal chamber at his death in 1440: Stell, trans., Probate Inventories (n. 36 above) 665. The evidence for women entertaining in chambers is more conspicuous at higher social levels, cf. the depiction of Christine de Pisan presenting her book to Isabel of Bavaria (London, British Library, MS Harl. 4431, fol. 3r) or Ni-cola McDonald’s work on women’s games (Nicola Mcdonald, “Games medieval women play,” The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette [Cambridge 2006] 176–197), but there is no reason to suppose that the comfortable chambers of some prosperous townsfolk were not likewise used.


kitchen equipment, the reverse of the peasant pattern. On the other hand, whereas most peasant household investment was in bedding and kitchen utensils, these only account for a minority of bourgeois outlay on household furnishings and equipment, so rein-forcing the sense that the home was about living rather than just shelter.

Again using inventory evidence, mercantile households share many characteristics with their artisanal counterparts, but there are some noteworthy differences too. Whereas artisans tended not to have an especially large proportion of their assets in the form of stock—the raw materials they worked with or the product they sold in their shop—merchants could have the majority of the moveable assets invested in stock.95 Thus only about one tenth of the total value of the moveable property of the Southampton merchant Richard Thomas, inventoried at his death in 1447, was in-vested in household goods and furnishings.96 If we exclude cash to the value of £140 from the calculation, the equivalent proportion for Richard Scoule (or Scowle), a mer-chant of Bishop’s Lynn, whose inventory was made in 1490, is a quarter; his ships alone were worth more than all his household furnishings, clothes, and jewelry.97 Scoule’s house was still fairly substantial, comprising hall, parlor, buttery, kitchen, a chamber over the parlor, a servants’ chamber, a corn loft, and a shop.98 Scoule clearly enjoyed a well-furnished home that housed not only his family, but servants that would have assisted equally in his business and his domestic interests. It is the evidence of standing buildings, however, that provides further clues to how the home was used. From his analysis of a large number of late medieval shops and merchant houses, David Clark convincingly argues that merchants probably did much of their business with clients inside the main house rather than within the sort of shop / workshop that characterized artisans’ premises.99 A comfortable and attractively furnished home, where clients could be entertained and perhaps even dined, would help create a suitable space for negotiating contracts in a world where credit, creditworthiness, and trust were the very essence of commerce.100 In 1429, for example, the York merchant Robert Lascelles dined Margaret Harman, a wax chandler, and her husband in his “summerhall” to help further an on-going business

95 Ibid. 130–131. 96 E. Roberts and K. Parker, eds., Southampton Probate Inventories, 1447–1575, 2 vols., Southampton

Records Series 34 and 35 (1992) 1.2–9. 97 TNA, PROB 2/40. Scoule had significant quantities of stockfish, grain, and what might be identified

as building supplies (including millstones). 98 The parlor clearly functioned as the principal bed chamber. It had a hanging around the walls valued

at 10s. and contained six “old” cushions in addition to the six cushions and five further “old” cushions found in the hall. The shop seems to have been a modest affair whose contents, primarily salt, candles, and a con-siderable quantity of hemp, were valued at less than two pounds; this was probably not where Scoule did business with his more substantial customers or suppliers. In his will, Scoule made provision for his widow, Agnes, to have use of the shop, hall, parlor, and the chambers on the (Wingate) street side and to have ac-cess to the far side of the property that fronted the Haven if she were to decline the use of another tenement called the brewhouse: TNA, PROB 11/8 (Scowle).

99 David Clark, “The Shop within? An Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops,” Architectural History 43 (2000) 58–87.

100 The later 14th c., but more particularly parts of the 15th c. were characterized by a shortage of ready money—the so-called “bullion famine.” Consequently much business was done on credit. For the impor-tance of trust in business relationships see Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, Guilds, and the Negotiation of Work in the Medieval Town,” Past and Present 154 (1997) 3–31.


relationship in which Lascelles supplied Harman with candlewick and subsequently sold her finished candles. It is likely that wives played a key part in enabling this kind of entertainment and, I would suggest, ensuring suitably comfortable furnishings and décor.101

This article began by questioning the prevailing orthodoxy that associates women with the home and the domestic. Such an equation is very immediately problematic for the manufacturers and traders of the late medieval town for who place of work and place of residence coincided. We need only consider Jean Bourdichon’s manuscript depiction of the working family, dating to the end of the fifteenth century, from his series of the four conditions of society, which clearly references the Holy Family, or an earlier (c. 1440) illumination of the Holy Family in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves to see that late medieval artists readily imagined the workshop as a space where husband and wife both worked, but that the task of childcare could be shared since there was no significant division between workspace and domestic space.102 It matters not that these are imagined spaces and not—as they at first appear—realistic depictions, but they do tell us something about the culture of the northern European town. In this urban context wives were very much seen as economic and emotional partners. For some wealthy artisans and merchants this comparatively egalitarian rela-tionship is perhaps reflected in the comfortably furnished hall and chamber. The hall was communal space where husband and wife might eat together, entertain, or spend leisure time. For this privileged group, the chamber was intimate space enjoyed exclu-sively by the couple (or perhaps the couple and nursing children), but also a private space where a woman could entertain her female friends.

The model of separate spheres, which associates women with the indoor world of the domestic and men with the outdoor world of work might seem to have more reso-nance in a peasant society characterized by rather conservative gender relations. It is not a model, however, that fits well with the evidence. The home was for most peas-ants primarily a place to sleep and, for peasants with land, also a place to cook and consume food and perhaps, for peasant women, to engage in a variety of productive activities. This essentially private, familial space in which there was probably little formal division between cooking, living and even sleeping places in all but the most prosperous peasant homes, especially before the mid fifteenth century, is not where to seek gendered space at least in essentially simplistic terms; the actual gendered dy-namics of life in a crowded and shared space are likely to be complex and largely un-

101 The business arrangement subsequently foundered, hence the breach of faith litigation which pro-vides the evidence for this observation: BI, CP.F.174; translated in Goldberg, ed. and trans., Women in England (n. 78 above) 241. A “summerhall” or “summer hall” probably overlaps with “parlor” to signify a slightly more intimate space than the main hall that could be used inter alia to entertain guests, but the spe-cific designation “summer” comes about because the space was unusually well suited to use in warm weather. Margaret Harman was dined in high summer on 18 July 1429. For an oblique window onto the importance of wives in the entertainment of a husband’s guests see book 6 of The Fyftene Joyes of Maryage, a satirical late medieval French text published in an English translation by Wynkyn de Worde around 1507 (STC 15258). The wife on getting word that her husband is bringing guests home sends the servants away so as to frustrate the preparation of food. She then contrives to mislay the keys to the linen chest so that clean linen tablecloths cannot be laid out. I am indebted to Sarah McCloughlin for this.

102 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; New York, Pierpoint Morgan Library, MS M. 917 p. 149.


recoverable.103 Most leisure time seems to have been spent and most of socializing done away from home. Within the public arenas of the church, the manorial hall, the tavern, the shooting butts, the market, the communal bakery or the village washing place it may be useful to ask how far and in what ways space was gendered, a question that is stifled in Hanawalt’s indoors / outdoors model. Presumably the two last—the washing place and the communal oven—were essentially women’s spaces since bak-ing for domestic consumption and laundering were women’s work. The shooting butts were men’s space. However, the church, the market, the pub, even the manorial court were communal spaces. Hanawalt’s model of women in and around the home, men in the fields and forests or Grenville’s of the patriarchal hall are ideological constructs that perhaps had little or only limited resonance for most peasants.

Normative ideology, as seen for example in such conduct texts as “How the Good-wife Taught her Daughter” with its admonition, “Byde thou at home, my doughter dere,” offers a simple message.104 Such texts—as we have seen in the case of “The Ballad”—were appropriated by London mercantile households at the end of the fif-teenth century in order extend discipline over and socialize teenage girls migrating in from the countryside into bourgeois mores.105 There is no reason for modern scholars to be attracted by the very simplicity of this normative ideology and every reason to be suspicious. Social practice suggests some different models, but they fall a long way short of laws. For the poor in both town and country much of the day for both males and females was spent outdoors. Their work frequently took them outside the home and they looked to a combination of meals from employers, street food and public houses for their sustenance. The alehouse and the street were probably the principal places to socialize. The home was essentially a place of shelter and a place to sleep, its spaces more conspicuously communal than specific to one or other gender. For better-off townsfolk, the home was more intensively used: it was the location of the family business; it was home to live-in servants as well as nuclear family; meals were pre-pared there and consumed by both household members and workers employed on a daily rate; guests were dined and entertained there; it might function as the locus of household devotions; and it was the venue for recreation. In a society of trade and commerce, of limited supplies of ready cash and a consequent reliance on credit, en-tertaining friends, business associates, prospective clients and the like was a necessary activity. In this way reputation, constructed in contemporary discourse as honor, but

103 Analogy with other pre-industrial cultures suggests a very considerable variety of practices ranging

from strict gender separation (e.g., within the Mongolian ger or yurt) to comparatively sexually integrated spaces (e.g., the Tuareg tent). These arrangements are connected to, but are not simple mirrors of gender ideology and practice within the wider culture. See Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill 1992) esp. 35–64; Sally S. Booth, “Reconstructing Sexual Geography: Gender and Space in Changing Sicilian Settle-ments,” House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Law-rence-Zúñiga (Oxford 1999) 133–156; Chang-Kwo Tan, “Building Conjugal Relations: The Devotion to House amongst the Paiwan of Taiwan,” Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford 2001) 149–172.

104 “How the Goode Wife Taught Hyr Doughter,” line 77, The Trials and Joys of Marriage, ed. Salis-bury (n. 13 above). This is the Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 edition of the poem dated ca. 1500. Earlier versions carry the same sentiment, but not precisely the same words.

105 Riddy, “Mother Knows Best” (n. 30 above) 80–85.


effectively trust-worthiness and credit-worthiness could be both projected and dis-cerned.

The very different functions and expectations of the house just outlined are neces-sarily reflected in the spatial divisions and furnishings. The poor habited accommoda-tion comprising one or two rooms that were spartanly furnished. Though the cramped conditions were not of themselves an obstacle to these spaces being divided along gender lines, there is little to suggest that this was the case. The well-to-do habited accommodation arranged over three or more rooms or divisions. The hall was a com-munal space furnished with an eye both to comfort and visual effect. The architectural arrangement of the hall gestured towards or was even closely modeled on high-status houses, but it need not follow that it carried the same resonances of patriarchy. The most substantial houses might have more than one chamber, but again this need not have been determined by gender. We might surmise the provision of separate sleeping spaces for male and female servants and male and female adolescent children, but this is not certain. We do occasionally have evidence for chambers that are specifically designated “servants’ chamber,” but these tend to contain a multiplicity of beds that could suggest space was shared by all servants.106 The principal consideration in the trend towards separate chambers was rather a concern with privacy and intimacy, in particular on the part of the married householders, which accords with essentially bourgeois understandings of the bond between husband and wife. The artisanal house-hold depended on the skills of the mistress as household manager and partner in the craft; this was a culture that in the later fourteenth and much of the fifteenth century expected wives to assist in the craft, to supplement the familial economy by spinning and brewing etc., and to continue the business as a widow.107 This gave wives both economic and political clout within the household and, I submit, a much greater voice than their peasant sisters in how the house might be equipped and furnished. Where Goodwife Overdo or Goodwife Scoule might readily have secured the purchase of feather bedding or new cushions, Goodwife Connyg knew not to ask. Her husband would see no reason for such urban frippery when it was land, livestock and farm equipment that secured their livelihood.108

This model of the prosperous bourgeois home stresses companionship between husband and wife and suggests that gender was not an especially significant factor in the organization and use of space. That said, we should acknowledge that the kitchen and food preparation areas were presumably seen as women’s space. A small number

106 E.g., TNA, PROB 2/40 (Scoule), 86 (Hychen); Stell, trans., Probate Inventories (n. 36 above) 655

(Pigott). We know neither the number nor the sex of the servants employed in these instances, though Mar-garet Pigott may well have had only female live-in servants. Servants of the same sex may well have shared a bed and the presence of several persons in the same room could have served to police against inappropri-ate behavior, cf. Eilert Sundt’s account of “night courting” in 19th-c. Norway: Eilert Sundt, On Marriage in Norway, trans. Michael Drake (Cambridge 1980) 159ff.

107 P. J. P. Goldberg, “Household and the Organisation of Labor in Late Medieval Towns: Some English Evidence,” The Household in Late Medieval Cities: Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared, ed. Miriam Carlier and Tim Soens (Leuven and Apeldoorn 2001) 59–70, 62–67, 69.

108 Cf. for a much later era, Amanda Vickery, “Women and the world of goods: a Lancashire consumer and her possessions,” Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. Roy Porter and John Brewer (London 1993) 274–301, 294 and nn. 123, 301.


of very wealthy mercantile houses contained a separate counting house. Judging from Richard Toky’s 1393 inventory, his was a very masculine space, with various items of armor and weaponry about the place—no doubt in part for reasons of security—but also alabaster images of the Virgin Mary and of St John the Baptist.109 The division of chambers, where there was more than one, would appear to be dictated primarily by household status. Wives and female employees likely moved between the domestic areas and the shop / workshop. The hall, into which the main entrance to the house commonly opened, represented the most public space. More private space might be provided by a parlor, but the most private spaces, located on an upper floor, were the chambers which appear sometimes to have been used as secure storage.110

Contrasting models of the housing of the poor and the prosperous tend, of course, towards caricature that does only limited justice to a diversity of housing types and users that have yet to be fully understood. They also suggests an essentially static pic-ture, a snapshot in time, whereas houses were constantly adapted and altered and peri-odically rebuilt in part in response to the changing needs and resources of those who lived and worked within them. How space was used might change through the day as furnishings were moved about, through the seasons, and, more especially, over time. I want now, therefore, to suggest a dynamic element to my analysis. The century fol-lowing the Black Death, an era of labor shortage and high money wages, saw rising living standards for many below the level of the aristocracy, enhanced economic roles for women, and significantly increased demand for adolescent and young adult live-in servants.111 Greater familial resources allowed for investment in buildings and in the furnishing of buildings even where these were not significant priorities. Among arti-sans and merchants at least, wives may have been allowed a larger influence over the furnishing. The need to accommodate servants and apprentices may have prompted a desire for more space and for greater privacy, reflected in the growing evidence for bed curtains and, for the few who could afford it, separate chambers; these trends are conspicuous in an urban context rather earlier than a rural.112 The second part of the fifteenth century saw a new dynamic. We find a considerable increase in more sub-stantial rural properties associated with what I have here described as an emergent yeomanry and rural artisans, but particularly clothiers. The stimulus for this new housing may in part be a desire to give material expression to a sense of self impor-tance in an era when manorialism—what Marxist scholars of peasant society would call feudalism—was increasingly moribund and substantial peasants could be found

109 Calendar of Select Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and Philip E.

Jones, 6 vols. (Cambridge 1926–1961) 3.209–213. 110 E.g., one of the chambers in Walter Mayow of Croscombe’s house in 1482 was used to store wool,

cloth and woad: TNA, PROB 2/10. Cf. Pearson, “Medieval Houses in English Towns” (n. 82 above) 20. 111 John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London 1977); David L.

Farmer, “Prices and Wages, 1350–1500,” The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume III: 1348–1500, ed. Edward Miller (Cambridge 1991) 431–525; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above); Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Girl power: the European marriage pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 63 (2010) 1–33.

112 P. J. P. Goldberg, “John Skathelock’s Dick: Voyeurism and ‘Pornography’ in Late Medieval Eng-land,” Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (Woodbridge 2006) 105–123, 113–115.


leasing the demesne or indeed the manor and where parochial guilds were sometimes exercising a kind of de facto local government.113 Their houses provided accommoda-tion for live-in servants, but the way space was used was perhaps rather more hierar-chical and gendered. Parallel trends may perhaps also be found in well-to-do urban housing as workshops became increasingly male space and increasingly separate from domestic space, the economic role of wives was eroded, and the status of female ser-vants declined.114

Our analysis can only represent a contribution to an ongoing debate and some of my conclusions are speculative. Much work remains to be done, for example, interro-gating museum collections and archaeological finds, using dendrochronology to refine construction dates, or, most importantly, linking documentary evidence to extant buildings.115 In this way our knowledge of the physical structures different levels of society habited and the material culture associated with these structures may be fur-thered. Understanding the cultural meanings of space or the way in which space may have been gendered, however, requires more than just a clearer picture of how medie-val houses were arranged and furnished. It is requires an understanding of how men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children, employers and servants all interacted with one another and how they used the spaces they occupied.116 We need a better understanding of how people were socialized to use living spaces and of the cultural resonances of the furnishings contained within those spaces. Some interesting work is beginning to be done in respect of this last.117 Conventional documentary and material cultural sources can, however, only take us so far. There is a need also to de-ploy narrative sources—romance, drama, poetry and the like—which offer a window both onto social practice and the mentalité that underpins that practice.118 Ultimately this is an interdisciplinary project.119

113 Bruce M. S. Campbell, “The land,” A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox

and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge 2006) 179–237, esp. 213–215, 232–233, 235–237; Virginia Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: social and religious change in Cambridgeshire, c. 1350–1558 (Wood-bridge 1996) 142.

114 Goldberg, “Household and the Organisation of Labour,” (n. 107 above) 62; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle (n. 17 above) 194–202. The status of many apprentices probably also declined as it is appar-ent that by the later 15th c. many more young men were securing apprentices than would be able to go on to secure workshops of their own. In effect apprenticeship often functioned as an inexpensive source of labor: Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans (Oxford 1989) 36.

115 One such project is ongoing at the University of York under the leadership of Dr. Sarah Rees Jones. See http://www.york.ac.uk/history/history-in-action/life-in-york/.

116 Cf. for aristocratic society: Kim M. Phillips, “Bodily Walls, Windows, and Doors: the Politics of Gesture in late Fifteenth-Century English Books for Women,” Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout 2000) 185–198.

117 E.g., Lynn Bowden, “Redefining kinship: exploring boundaries of relatedness in late medieval New Romney,” Journal of Family History 29.4 (2004) 407–420; Catherine Richardson, “Household objects and domestic ties,” The Medieval Household in Christian Europe c 850–1550: managing power, wealth and the body, ed. Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout 2003) 433–447; Sheila Sweetinburgh, “Remembering the Dead at Dinner-Time,” Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Farnham 2010) 257–266.

118 See Felicity Riddy, “Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home,” Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca 2003) 212–228.

119 See Felicity Riddy, “‘Burgeis’ domesticity in late medieval England,” Medieval Domesticity, ed. Kowaleski and Goldberg (n. 53 above) 14–36.


I will end with a story. William Pountfret, a well-to-do draper, lived—to judge from immediately neighboring properties that are still standing—in a substantial town house fronting Coppergate and directly opposite the church of All Saints, Pavement in the commercial heart of York. As might be expected for a man of his status, the 1381 poll tax returns indicate he employed at least two live-in female servants. Next door—documented from property deeds—lived another draper, John Thornton. But for a memorial inscription recorded by an eighteenth-century antiquary and the chance sur-vival of a matrimonial case in the archiepiscopal court, we would have reason to as-sume that the Pountfret residence corresponded to the mercantile model outlined above. Indeed in some respects no doubt it did. The court case relates to the summer of 1410. By this date Pountfret and his neighbor were both elderly widowers. What the court action reveals, however, is that Pountfret then shared his house with Dame Christine, a relative who was a vowess, a devout widow who had taken vows of celi-bacy. She had her own room in his house. Coming to share the room with Dame Christine that summer was one Agnes Grantham, the recent widow of a prosperous mason who ran her own brewing business. Although she periodically visited her own home to manage her brewing enterprise and care for her poor neighbors, Agnes spent much time in the parish church of All Saints. The reason for Agnes’s sudden arrival was that she had fled her own home in fear of further assault by a man who had earlier abducted her and threatened to rape her, but also because she had just married Pount-fret’s neighbor, John Thornton. Why did she not in fact move into the neighbor’s house? Perhaps because the couple never intended cohabitation—theirs was to be a chaste marriage as might befit an elderly man and a devout widow beyond (or nearly so) childbearing. But we also know that Pountfret and Thornton were “socii”: they lived next door to one another, they had traded together over many years, their wives had been very close in their lifetimes, and the two men were buried side by side, the memorial to Thornton and his (first) wife Katherine specifically describing Pountfret as their friend (“socii eorum”). Here, then, we have two households that functioned as one, were doubly joined by (probably chaste) male friendship of the kind described by Alan Bray and chaste marriage, where the neighboring church functioned as an exten-sion of the house, and where a devout widow kept in effect a household within a household.120 What dynamics of space and gender prevailed here? We may only sur-mise, but the point is that the chance survival of a narrative source—the depositions from the ecclesiastical court—alerts us to the much more complex and messy world of real people and lived lives.121

120 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago 2003). 121 BI, CP.F.36. I have explored this case at length in “Brewing Trouble: The Devout Widow’s Tale,”

Jeremy Goldberg, Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages (New York 2007) 129–146.

Space and Gender in the Later Medieval English House

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