The many under-age orphans in the manorial countryside of late medieval England are needles in a haystack, especially when they are of unfree status, and Miriam Müller leads us on a successful search for these elusive creatures. The question she confronts concerns what can we learn about their fates as orphans and wards and how--assuming survival into adulthood--they were trained and socialized to claim their own as the next generation in a world decimated by the great famine of the early fourteenth century and then even more so by the plague in the 1340s and afterwards? Müller's answers, or rather her judicious selection of anecdotes, case studies, and statistical aggregations rest on the survival (and editing) of manorial court rolls and related documents and she offers well grounded answers to the questions she poses in this novel approach to a topic of considerable current interest.
We can divide the road that leads from orphanage to young adulthood--and to the effort to explicate it--into several stages or segments of the overall investigation. First was the need in the village to find a guardian (or more than one, as when a mother and an uncle shared the role) for the many parent-less children who ranged in age from shortly after birth (fifteen days for our youngest survivor) or a few months, to girls and boys already in their teens. Then Müller turns to the coming of age process or transition. This turns out to be a tale of different ages on different manors and for different purposes: boys in the tithing at 12, but then only of full legal age at Halesown at 20, or even at 21 as they reckoned things at Elderfield in Worcestershire; boys answerable for crimes at 14, but girls at an unchivalrous 12; both sexes at 14 for poll tax head-counting. Then there was that one young man who at age fifteen chose to contract for wages rather than await full age when he could claim his own. And as well as age in years--however that was reckoned and accepted by all parties--there was the make-or-break issue of the recovery, the handing back of the young man or young woman's holding. Usually in village society this transition was accomplished without undue hesitancy or hostility, though at times it might be contentious and on occasion, the new holder could be less than pleased with the condition of what was being returned. The now-of-age orphan had the right to object not just to depredations to the property but to commitments that had been made during the minority without her or his informed consent, though how such grievances and the accompanying litigation worked out in practice could be a mixed bag.
Given the high incidence of orphanage in the fourteenth century, the survey of the condition of the holding as part of the transition whereby it was being returned must have been among the regular procedures before the manorial court and on the bailiff or the reeve's agenda. And beyond the legal and economic aspect of orphanage and the issue of the "inheritance" of the holding, Müller looks with some concern at how the young person had been trained, socialized, and even perhaps "schooled" (in a formal sense, as for the parish priesthood) to ensure that she or he would become a productive member of what was usually a cooperative community (by necessity if not necessarily by amiability).
The manorial records that we have are often quite precise about the age of the orphan when the wardship was being granted, which is also a guide to the guardian's length (if not depth) of commitment and possible years of profit. In Table 2 (122), Müller gives the ages of wards at five manors before, during, and after the Black Death; that children under age ten comprise the majority of those whose age we can pin down is no surprise. Almost half of the orphans we can track in the years before the coming of the plague were below ten (45%), well over half in the worst years of the plague (80%), and still over half in later years (52%), though a fair number of the orphans in each chronological bracket have to be listed as of unknown age: 28%, 7%, and 24% of the totals, respectively.
Who stood up as guardian for these orphans--as we remember that profit (or potential profit) as well as responsibility--was in the equation. To this question of "who," there is a multiplicity of answers, the variety no doubt reflecting the nature and prevalence of extended and compound families of the countryside, as well as an involvement in other people's affairs and, when the plague struck, the general disorder of society. For five manors whose records lend themselves to this query, in descending order of incidence the guardian was the widow (of the deceased male holder, presumably the heir's step-parent), the orphan's mother, the lord of the manor, a clergyman, but again, "other" and "unknown" actually lead the pack. Furthermore, given the precarious nature of life in the worst of those years, in many cases neither the orphan nor the original guardian survived until the former had reached the age of majority, thus complicating both personal and family commitments as well as the lord's ceaseless demand for workers in the fields.
Returning the land to the orphan, assuming she or he lived to come of age, marks the end-point of Müller's investigation. Those who had held the land and who had provided the required services and enjoyed what profits it had yielded, but rarely questioned the moment of the heir's coming of age, let alone any claims to tenancy (or ownership, as the case went). If the holding had been pillaged, the new holder could try her or his hand at local law, and as against the specter of loss or spoliation or entanglement there was the provision that the claimant could renounce unwelcome commitments made without her or his consent during the years of guardianship. This material gives an on-the-ground view of how the mores and laws of rural society struck some form of balance between tradition, the protection of those in need of such, the possibilities for aggrandizement and aggression, and the entanglements of village life.
Much emphasis in this monograph is on the way that young people were brought, through the stages of growth and maturation, into adulthood, and into their share of full responsibility and membership in the community of the village. Working in the fields, we are reminded, was not a simple and intuitive matter; tending animals, raising crops, carrying out a craft, testifying in the manorial court, tracing consanguineous relationships, etc., were all skills and categories of knowledge to which children of both sexes were introduced at an early age. Even without famine and pandemic, life was precarious and communal life depended on raising the young to play their part from early age. Müller's desire to" focus on the agency of young people" (11)--rather than just looking at how they were defined by adults--is a worthy theme for understanding much of what follows in her subsequent chapters.
In this book we have an under-studied problem tackled with insight and sympathy. However, to begin by pointing to Philippe Aries as the founding father of the history of children and childhood, and then to point out how he missed the medieval bus, no longer seems necessary. Chapter one might have covered this oft-told tale with a lighter touch. A more serious criticism concerns the tabular and statistical presentations and here this valuable monograph does fall a bit short. While Chart 1 (123) on the sex ratio of child heirs, or Chart 2 (124), on the proportions of male and female heirs, deliver the kind of information we wish to learn, to cast the findings--as is the case with most of the other tables and graphs--in percentages with no clue as to the N (the number) behind the percentages greatly reduces their value. A listing the varieties of livestock (Table 5, p. 96), or of the tools mentioned in inventories (Table 4, p. 96), is interesting for the variety of items named, but, again, it is offered with no reference to how wide a sweep was necessary to find those 3 horses or 2 bullocks, or that one cart without iron wheels, or that one mattock. Though it would be a huge jump in terms of social status, sources such as Inquisitions Post Mortem or Proofs of Age could offer comparative material about both the age and the identity of minor heirs. Also, the practice of putting each chapter's bibliography at the chapter's end rather than in one consolidated form had meant much duplication of citations and less convenience in consulting the scholarly basis behind this very commendable exploration of village life, demography, and childhood.