that the parents of the bride and groom undertook at the formation of a new marriage.
The bride brought to the marriage a dowry that might take the form of money, cattle,
land, household goods, or other assets, while the groom guaranteed the support of his
wife through marriage (brideprice) in the early Middle Ages or provision of a dower in
the later Middle Ages.
The work that the couple engaged in fell into separate spheres. The woman’s work
was primarily that of the house and village, while the men worked primarily in fields,
vineyards, and highways. Women’s work included the rearing and training of the children
in the household; work with domestic animals, such as cows, pigs, goats, and poultry;
production of cheeses, butter, linen and woolen thread, and perhaps bread and beer for
the market economy; planting and harvesting from the kitchen garden and the fruit trees;
and tending the hearth fire, cooking the meals, and doing the laundry. Housecleaning
occupied little time in the rudimentary peasant dwellings. Women did field work on a
largely seasonal basis that included weeding, hoeing, and helping with harvesting. Men’s
work included working with the horses and oxen used for plowing and carting; plowing
and other heavy field work; construction, wine production, butchering, road repair, and so
on. The roles that men and women played in the household economy were so well
defined and so heavily relied upon that when one of the couple died the other most
frequently remarried quickly to reestablish the unit.
Although male and female children identified with the roles they would come to play
in the household economy when they were toddlers, they evolved only gradually into the
tasks they would eventually perform. Thus, boys and girls of five through ten first helped
their mothers in such tasks as caring for poultry, picking vegetables and fruits, and
fetching water. By the age of ten, male children began to work more with the tasks their
fathers assigned, such as herding, goading the ox, and other field work. Only gradually
did the older teenaged boys learn to plow and girls to brew or bake.
Barbara Hanawalt
FAMINE
. Conditions of death or starvation resulting from crop failure caused by poor weather,
infestation by pests, warfare, or other factors were considered famine. Records depict
crowds of beggars waiting for food at the gates of monasteries, peasants abandoning
holdings to seek food and livelihoods in other districts, distended stomachs from attempts
to live on grass and roots, and human flesh hung up for sale in the markets. For the early
Middle Ages, such conditions cannot have been markedly different from normal
subsistence levels of the populace, which was consistently near starvation, when endemic
malnutrition caused high infant mortality and low fertility, and when a diet composed
almost entirely of cereals meant that human productivity and resistance to disease were
low. Given the almost total dependence of the agricultural population on cereals and the
extremely low yields of agriculture at the time (between 2:1 and 3:1 yield-to-seed ratios
being considered normal) any slight worsening of weather, infestation of crops, or other
bad luck could cause the inhabitants of a district to begin consuming grain needed for
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 644