Life in the Middle Ages

What Everyone Owed to Someone, Rank by Rank

von Lucian Kentmere

296 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Everyone knows medieval people died at thirty. They did not. That number is a population average dragged down by infant mortality and describes almost no one who actually lived it: a child who survived to twenty could expect another twenty-five to thirty more years, a range drawn from four independent bodies of evidence, each flawed in a different way, that converge on the same shape.This is a history of that ordinary life built from structure rather than story. It opens on four households of the year 1300, in England, Flanders, Norway and Castile, sharing no common language, diet, legal status, form of landholding or settlement size, and lets the differences stand before any generalization about the age gets made.Two opposing myths get corrected with equal weight. The village as a warm, spontaneous community collapses against the survey evidence: many villages were laid out or resurveyed to a plan between the ninth and twelfth centuries, run by a jury of the wealthiest few households rather than an equal fellowship. The claim that nobody washed collapses just as completely: licensed bathhouses stood in the towns of the German and Flemish lands, bathkeepers held guild status, and wills funded washing for the poor. Public bathing declined over the course of the sixteenth century, under plague fear, firewood prices and new codes of public morals, none of them medieval habits.What held these households together, high or low, was not poverty and not piety, both common to most of history, but the density of obligation. Nearly everyone stood in a defined, enforceable, written relationship to somebody else, a lord, a guild, a parish, a tithing group, and much of daily life meant meeting those obligations, evading them, or buying a way out. That structure is the subject of this book, and one of its sharpest scenes is small: on a court day in 1294, between a widow taking over her dead husband's holding and the choosing of the reeve, a dispute over a debt of eighteen pence is heard and settled, because obligation was worth exactly that much.Lucian Kentmere draws on manorial court rolls, guild statutes, wills, parish accounts and three generations of social history scholarship, with four line drawings, from the village plan to the churchyard. The result is a history of a structure that varied by rank and region, not a single life imagined as everyone's life.

• ISBN: 9798192945353
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 16.08.2026
• Größe: 203 x 127 mm
• Verlag: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp