Medieval Households

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble households were defined as agents of government in the administration of local communities. Many of the papers therefore address the public functions and perceptions of the household, and argue that the formulation of domestic (or family) values was of essential importance in the growth and development of the medieval Christian state.

Contributors to this volume of collected essays write from a number of disciplinary perspectives (archaeological, art-historical, historical and literary). They examine socially diverse households (from peasants to kings) and use case studies from different regions across Europe in different periods within the medieval epoch from c. 850 to c. 1550. The volume both includes studies from archives and collections not often covered in English-language publications, and offers new approaches to more familiar material. It is divided into thematic sections exploring the role of households in the exercise of power, in controlling the body, in the distribution of wealth and within a wider economy of possessions.

This thesis ultimately seeks to understand how and why the London armourers came to be so closely associated with the politics and uprisings of London’s controversial mayor, John Northampton (1381-1383). However, because the armourers were not incorporated as a combined guild until 1453, this thesis must first analyse how the armourers developed as an industry, and how their workshop, household, and socio-industrial networks and organisations developed and helped to inform their political identities. This is the first time that the fourteenth-century London armourers have been rigorously examined as a collective of constituent specialist industries, and this thesis contributes to an understanding of how late medieval small crafts developed outside of guilds.

Through examining armourers’ workshops, households, and socio-industrial networks, this thesis arrives at several important conclusions about the nature of the English industry in the fourteenth century which challenge existing scholarship. It finds evidence to explode scholarly myths that English armour was cheap and poorly made through lack of skill, that women did not participate in the industry, and that regulation of the industry was entirely imposed from outside. Finally, this study shows that the armourers were the most significant participants in the 1384 Mayoralty Riots because their workshop, household, and socio-industrial networks had all contributed to the development of a shared political identity, because Northampton’s opponent Nicholas Brembre attacked that identity, and because the Crown and City’s draconian policies towards the local armour market had grown increasingly severe prior to the riots. This thesis argues that the armourers’ political identity developed as an extension of their workshop, household, and socioindustrial identities and networks, and that each of these contributed to their overall organisational development outside of a guild structure.

This paper analyses two late sixteenth-century armorials with the coats of arms of the 235 participants of a tournament organized in May 1439 on the central market square, the Grote Markt, of Brussels. The armorials, trustworthy copies of a now lost original, record the performance of an exclusive social category in public space, and express in a distinctive visual way the internal hierarchy of the tourneying society: team leaders, leaders of large companies, leaders of of small companies, and 'ordinary' participants. The heraldic elements that were essential to this hierarchic arrangement - banners, pennons, shields – were actually used during the tournament, as well as the depicted helmets and crests.
It goes without saying that these occasional rolls were important for the nobility of the Low Countries, both at the time of the tournament and at the time of their creation in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Inclusion of their coats of arms in the armorials ensured the participants of a place in the collective memory. The compilers of the armorials played an essential role in defining the nobility as a social category since participating in a tournament meant that you lived nobly and that your peers considered you as a nobleman. The two copies of the original armorial in the last decades of the sixteenth century reproduced the social classification within the nobility in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. It shows that the same mechanisms of social distinction still played a role at that time.

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Our article explores the bed as an object that projects notions of status, aspiration, decorum, and morality. We are interested in the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery. We situate our analysis in relation to literal and represented household beds, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household. To Johan Bedell my servaunt . . . an honest whole complete bed and all other things therto belonging for a bedde.—John Goodwyn, 1522 (TNA Prob11/20/377) Take here hede and lerne howeȝ þou schalt make an honest bede and a good plesinge vnto god profitabel and worschipful vnto þi soule. (Take heed here and learn how you shall make an honest bed a...

Longer analysis / essay on the mid-16th century housing remains found during the earthworks inside the prince-bishops castle of Haapsalu. The stove tiles have been separatedly analysed (http://tinyurl.com/lygzfkk ), the present paper is more or less aimed to the general (estonian speaking) public.  //Läänemaa Muuseumi Toimetised XVI (2013). Haapsalu, 88-130.

Our article explores the bed as an object that projects notions of status, aspiration, decorum, and morality. We are interested in the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery. We situate our analysis in relation to literal and represented household beds, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household. To Johan Bedell my servaunt . . . an honest whole complete bed and all other things therto belonging for a bedde.—John Goodwyn, 1522 (TNA Prob11/20/377) Take here hede and lerne howeȝ þou schalt make an honest bede and a good plesinge vnto god profitabel and worschipful vnto þi soule. (Take heed here and learn how you shall make an honest bed a...

Home is one of the most emotive words in any language but our experience of being at home is historically and culturally specific. This article reviews a range of recent scholarship on the later medieval English urban household in the disciplines of History, Literary criticism and Archaeology. It has been composed collaboratively by the members of the York Medieval Household Research Group. After an introduction tracing the wider context in which all histories of domesticity are located, we focus in on our particular period through a close study of contemporary later medieval vocabularies of homeliness. This is followed by a sequence of short thematic sections addressing the historiography of different aspects the demographic structure, ideological construction and daily and emotional life of the household as reflected in the current interests of members of the group.

Home is one of the most emotive words in any language but our experience of being at home is historically and culturally specific. This article reviews a range of recent scholarship on the later medieval English urban household in the disciplines of History, Literary criticism and Archaeology. It has been composed collaboratively by the members of the York Medieval Household Research Group. After an introduction tracing the wider context in which all histories of domesticity are located, we focus in on our particular period through a close study of contemporary later medieval vocabularies of homeliness. This is followed by a sequence of short thematic sections addressing the historiography of different aspects the demographic structure, ideological construction and daily and emotional life of the household as reflected in the current interests of members of the group.

Our article explores the bed as an object that projects notions of status, aspiration, decorum, and morality. We are interested in the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery. We situate our analysis in relation to literal and represented household beds, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household. To Johan Bedell my servaunt . . . an honest whole complete bed and all other things therto belonging for a bedde.—John Goodwyn, 1522 (TNA Prob11/20/377) Take here hede and lerne howeȝ þou schalt make an honest bede and a good plesinge vnto god profitabel and worschipful vnto þi soule. (Take heed here and learn how you shall make an honest bed a...

Our article explores the bed as an object that projects notions of status, aspiration, decorum, and morality. We are interested in the economic and symbolic values that accrue to the bed, bedding, and the bedroom in late medieval England, as described in wills and household accounts, and as evoked in literary and artistic imagery. We situate our analysis in relation to literal and represented household beds, those associated with birth and inheritance and also those portrayed in images of death. “Childbed” and “deathbed” are terms that frame the human lifecycle. They also invoke the most important item of furniture in the premodern household. To Johan Bedell my servaunt . . . an honest whole complete bed and all other things therto belonging for a bedde.—John Goodwyn, 1522 (TNA Prob11/20/377) Take here hede and lerne howeȝ þou schalt make an honest bede and a good plesinge vnto god profitabel and worschipful vnto þi soule. (Take heed here and learn how you shall make an honest bed a...