Between Households: Children in Blended and Transitional Households in Late-Medieval England

Abstract

The predominance of the nuclear family in England since the fourteenth century and the concomitant theory that English children normatively lived with their families of origin at least until adolescence has been an article of belief almost unquestioned in late-medieval English historiography over the past forty years. Studies of late-medieval childhood have, in fact, rarely analyzed the lived situations of medieval children, instead primarily addressing the literary or prescriptive representations of childhood or children’s (mostly upper-class boys’) education. This paper throws such assumptions and approaches into question. I analyze accounts of the situations of both boys and girls aged under thirteen, from a wide range of social backgrounds, embedded in the records of church courts and Chancery and Papal Petitions in the period 1350–1500. I argue that a range of factors—most notably death of a parent and illegitimate birth—rendered children liable to be shifted from household to household, often outside their nuclear family altogether. These situations may not have been rare; analysis of records of Inquisitions Post Mortem shows that in nearly twenty percent of a large sample of late-medieval English families, at least one parent died before the eldest child of the couple was thirteen. Furthermore, death of a father, or illegitimacy where the parents were either clerics or servants, could send children into a great range of non-nuclear family situations—short-term wardships with strangers, underage marriages, a variety of boarding arrangements. Hence, though our sources do not allow a rigorous statistical study of the numbers of late-medieval English children living outside (or between) nuclear families, they enable us better to appreciate the mobility of children outside the nuclear family and bring into view the great range of household situations in which they lived.

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