Topic 11: Introduction to the Late Middle Ages and the Black Death
Overview and Reading Assignment
The last topic of discussion, the rise of universities, which appeared towards the end of the High Middle Ages, was certainly a befitting topic to close that era. The designation, 'high' reflects historians' evaluations of that period. Towns, with a relatively sophisticated, literate culture, revived in that period. Many scholars point to a "twelfth-century Renaissance." The rural population grew significantly, and there were less slaves, and more peasants enjoyed better diets and living conditions.
However, by the thirteenth century, and certainly at its end, many Europeans were not living as well as they had in the twelfth century. In this topic, developments which negatively affected the culture and medieval people are discussed. The worst of all phenomena was the incursion of the plague in the mid-fourteenth century.
In conjunction with Topic 11, one should read in Hunt, et al., The Making of the West, Vol. I: To 1740, 2nd ed., pp. 436-38, 467-68, 482-87.
XI. Introduction to the Late Middle Ages and the Black Death
A. An Arrogant Papacy. The medieval papacy claimed extraordinary powers. They owned outright the Papal States, lands cutting Italy in two, and they claimed absolute authority over all churches and church officials in Europe. Moreover, they advanced the argument that the spiritual power on the earth was superior to the secular power, whether emperor, king, prince or knight. The papacy argued that how one spent eternity was much more important than how one lived on this earth. Therefore, whoever stood guard over the entrance to heaven must be obeyed, and popes asserted that they alone held the keys to the kingdom of God. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) represents the apex of the papacy's ascendancy over European nations. Innocent stated most forcefully the doctrine of the plentitude of papal power. As Christ's vicar on earth, the fullness of power resided in him. In his words: "You see . . . the vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of Peter, anointed of the Lord, a God of Pharaoh, set between God and man, lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and is judged by no one."
Pope Innocent strove to establish the papacy as the supreme power over Europe. With substantial resources and submissive clergy at his beck and call, Innocent staked his claims. Declarations of jurisdiction were translated into effective supervision over the affairs of the western church. Popes and church lawyers had devised a system of ecclesiastical courts in which appeals from lower ecclesiastical courts could reach the papal curia, the highest court of appeals. Canon (church) law became more universal, but papal justice grew expensive which bred resentment and dissatisfaction. Innocent expanded the papal revenue base; an income tax of 2.5 % was placed on all clergy.
Later popes continued to press the extraordinary powers asserted by Innocent III. Popes used the prestige of their spiritual office to bolster their political ambitions. They wanted to enlarge the Papal States, and they chose allies on the basis of that policy. Their political enemies were branded as enemies of God. The papacy's territorial ambitions were exposed, for it was directly involved in political and military affairs in order to safeguard its holdings on the Italian peninsula. The papacy won the struggle against German emperors in the thirteenth century, barely. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it remained to be seen if the national monarchies of England and France would continue to submit to papal pronouncements. They would not, for they had come to believe that secular power was equally ordained by God.
Within the church, reform and protest movements arose that strove mightily to reform the ancient institution and combat heresy in urban areas. New life was breathed into churches by the Dominicans, while the Franciscans carried the gospel in word and deed outside monastery walls. The main obstacle, however, to these reform efforts, arose at the top. Reform in members seemed possible; reform at the head, the papacy, dubious. To the extent that literacy grew, an independence was fostered among not only religious circles, but also in society. Its effects were so multi-faceted that no one could predict the outcomes, but with hindsight one can see increased estrangement between a hierarchically-dominated church and the laity, particularly urban and educated, who were searching for spiritual security and certainty. They found surety on the local, community level, not at the supra-national institution of the papacy.
B. A Weakened German Empire. Meanwhile, the German empire narrowly escaped complete liquidation. In his effort to gain control over Italy, the last great Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, gave up on ruling Germany. Popes may have felt secure, but Germany was severely weakened, disunited, and unstable. Elsewhere, the "Golden Horde," a seemingly invincible Mongolian army, led by Batu (1224-56), the grandson of Genghis Khan (1206-27), had just overrun the plains of southern Russia, burning to the ground the cities of Kiev, Riazan, and Moscow. The Mongols rode west and crushed the combined forces of the Poles and Teutonic knights in 1241. Batu was poised to strike further into Europe when he was suddenly called away to Mongolia. Some historians theorize that if Batu had continued to march west into a fragile German empire, "western" civilization, as it is known today, would never have materialized.
C. From Feudal to National Monarchies. As the thirteenth century unfolded, monarchies in Europe grew more centralized, and their bureaucracies were enlarged. Kings were stronger political figures than they had been in the feudal age, in which they were hardly more than first peers among equals. Monarchies were able to exert more authority for a number of reasons, among them: 1) the incorporation of Roman law principles into their law codes, principles which gave more power to kings at the expense of nobles; 2) larger tax bases; 3) expansion of kings' household government into small and large councils, filled with literate and trained officials and secretaries; 4) the introduction of national and regional representative assemblies, e.g., Parliament in England, which kings used to their advantage, often for tax purposes.
D. Dissension in the Academic Community. One of the truly great highlights of the Middle Ages, a crowning intellectual achievement, was the establishment of universities. In these institutions, the ascendance of reason over faith was complete. Medieval theologians were confident that inconsistencies in the writings of the church fathers and in biblical texts could be hammered out by employing the rules of logic and grammatical analysis, principles used in the medieval study of theology called scholasticism. With the expertise of Aristotle, all problems could be solved, and truth in philosophy and truth in theology would be demonstrated to be one and indivisible. This was the accomplishment of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274): an all-encompassing synthesis of knowledge. However, three years after his death several of his points were condemned by a Parisian bishop. A consensus of the synthesis proved illusory.
E. Strained Agrarian Production. Demographically, Europe had reached the maximum point of expansion by the thirteenth century, bound as it was by inefficient agrarian production. Europe's population could grow no more owing to limitations in existing technology and soil exploitation. The system was pressed to its limits. It is estimated that in England the typical family needed ten to fifteen acres of land to feed itself. By the end of the thirteenth century, it seems 50 % of English peasants were living off of less than ten acres. Conditions turned worse.
The climate became cooler and wetter. Drift ice in the North Atlantic made sea travel much more dangerous. Herring, a major food source for northern Europeans, could hardly be found in the Baltic Sea. Growing seasons were shortened and vegetation distribution was significantly altered. General crop failures from 1313-22 through most of Europe including England led to unprecedented famine. Famine struck again in southern Europe in 1339 and 1340. Starving people ate not only reserves, but seed grain set aside for next season. English chroniclers report of parents eating children; Irish writers claimed bodies were disinterred from graveyards, and Polish sources reveal that criminals' bodies were snatched from hanging posts. Intellectually, politically, and demographically, Europe had reached a point of crisis. And then it really got bad.
F. The Black Death. As the first decades of the fourteenth century unfolded, the population was in a weakened condition, and therefore, was more vulnerable to a deadly bacteria, spawned in the East. The Black Death, as it was called, was responsible for reducing the population by more at least 30 %.
It was a terrible time in Europe, especially in the western half of the continent. For those who survived, however, new opportunities were available in all levels of society. The Black Death accelerated social and economic trends which had been developing for decades. As a result, more peasants in the west were liberated from serfdom, while the economic status of the ascendant class, the nobility, declined.
1. Culprits and Casualties. In October 1347, a Genoese ship landed in Messina (Sicily). Several of the crew members were dead, others very ill. The Genoese sailors had contracted a bacillus, today designated as Yersinia pestis. They had been infected by fleas, carried by black rats. They picked up the rats and fleas on their voyage to the Black Sea region, the end point for western trading expeditions. The disease had originated in the Gobi desert in Asia. The Messinians forced the sick sailors back on to their ship, whereupon they, the rats, and the fleas landed on the Italian mainland. Soon all Italy was ravaged by the plague. Before the year ended, the plague invaded southern France, including the new papal city Avignon, where half of the College of Cardinals were struck down in a matter of weeks. It reached England in August 1348.
The black rats which carried the flea and bacteria are remarkable athletes. They have a vertical leap of two feet and a horizontal leap of four feet; they can fall fifty feet and survive. The rats can scale brick walls and climb a metal pipe no more than 1.5" in diameter. They could tolerate a moderate amount of Yersinia pestis in their bodies; however, once they succumbed to the bacteria and their dead bodies cooled, fleas, sensitive to temperature changes, quickly found another host.
Graham Twigg and others have shown that at least in England and Scotland the plague was not the only killer. The spore-producing bacteria of anthrax, highly contagious and deadly to cattle and humans, probably killed many, although no conclusive proof of its existence has been found on the continent. The spread of anthrax explains why in England the disease affected non-urbanized regions, and why some died without the telltale marks of the plague.
After the initial outbreak, the plague struck again and again. It broke out in 1361, and especially children and young people born after 1348 were decimated. There were outbreaks in 1368 and 1375 and subsequent years. Owing to crowded living conditions, in some towns, 50% of the population perished, and many villages were deserted. Monasteries were vacant as the brothers vanished; perhaps half the clergy in England were killed. By 1400, Europe's population had been reduced by at least one-third of pre-plague figures. England's population went from about 3.7 million in 1348 to 2.2 million in 1377, a 45% reduction. Not till ca. 1550 did populations reach their previous highs. The plague continued to torment Europeans well into the eighteenth century.
2. Kinds of Plague. There were three types of plague: a) Bubonic. This strain attacks the lymph system. Lymph nodes swell particularly in the groin (Greek boubon—hence bubonic) and in armpits. Subcutaneous hemorrhaging occurs, causing purplish patches on the skin to appear. The bubonic strain was not responsible for most deaths; it is more difficult to transmit. (An infected rat transmits the bacilli to a flea or flea to rat or human).
b) Pneumonic (the real killer), attacks the respiratory system, spread by coughing. People turn pale, then blue as their lungs fill with inflammation. The victim's cough is full of bloody sputum, including air-borne bacteria; 95% of those infected directly might die.
c) Septicemic afflicts the circulatory system. When a flea, or perhaps a rat, bit a human to suck blood, some bacilli might be injected directly into the blood stream.
One can only imagine the fear and disruption caused by the pandemic. It affected all age groups and social classes. People who were healthy one day were dead three days later. They had no idea how the disease was transmitted. The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris blamed the disease on the unusual planetary conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius, which had been noted in 1345.
The plague finally subsided owing to: a) improvements in housing (wood homes were converted to brick); b) enforcement of quarantine regulations; but most of all to c) changes in the rat population. The black rats, which carried the infected fleas, were replaced by another species of brown rats; and gradually, d) generations of people developed immunity through those who survived.
3. Plague Effects. Short-term. Deaths disrupted production in countrysides and towns. Agricultural products' cost rose sharply until ca. 1375. Recovery did not begin until late in the fourteenth century when cereal prices declined while the cost of labor increased—dramatically. Wages for casual labor doubled in one ten year period. Western European landlords had to offer better rents to keep peasants working on their fields. The English government stepped in and issued legislation in 1351 designed to keep peasants on original plots of land and to fix prices and wages. It decreed that all landless men must accept work when it was offered to them and prohibited peasants from moving from one manor to another. The enactment actually had little effect on wages and rents.
Long-term. The plague in the west accelerated the transition from a barter to a money form of exchange. It also altered the manorial system so much so that the modern division of land owners and renters was installed in its place. Since the twelfth century, the manorial system was under increasing strain. For some time, more and more feudal obligations had been commuted into money payments. Several factors aided this transformation. Technological improvements in plows and transportation (horses replacing oxen and four-wheeled wagons replacing two-wheeled carts) enabled peasants to transport and sell surpluses at market centers. Moreover, after 1315, when the great famine struck, the population declined. In order to maintain labor forces, lords were compelled to eliminate manorial servile obligations and convert them into money payments. Furthermore, they rented out their demesne to peasants. The pace of these changes was quickened in the aftermath of the plague.
Some landlords, refusing to accept market changes, attempted to force peasants to abide by archaic feudal laws, or they imposed new laws and fines. Such harsh treatment aggravated peasant discontent and fueled an English peasant rebellion in 1381. Other landlords diversified crops in order to compete better in the market. More landowners responded by renting out their demesne to ambitious peasants and business corporations. If successful, these enterprising peasants might work their way into the land-owning gentry class, a group in society, just below the noble ranks, but clearly above the peasantry. These enviable peasants managed to avoid the pitfall of day laborers, much more susceptible to market forces. Another option entailed a shift from crops to grazing, which did not yet lead to an extensive enclosure movement.
Western peasants who survived, despite the pain of losing so many loved ones, enjoyed better living conditions. Diversification of crops led to a better diet. More grazing produced more meat and more leather. Overall, the status of the English peasantry and some peasants in France and northern Germany was improving. Serfdom was replaced by long-term lease farming. Once a landlord leased his demesne, peasants were no longer required to perform manorial services. Instead, they arranged contracts with landlords in which the peasant paid a fixed rent, and these rents were lowered through the course of the century. Land passed from father to son upon the payment of a fee. Thus the new tenant was a freeman holding his land by what was virtually a perpetual lease.
It was a different story in eastern Europe, where serfdom was extended. The plague did not devastate the east as it did the west. Moreover, the eastern economy was developing along different lines. Trade among cities was not important, for there were fewer towns in the east. Eastern landowners were selling surplus grain to the west. They acquired more authority over peasants/serfs. Kings and other top noble officials allowed landlords to expand local authority in return for military and administrative service.
In western towns, scarcity of labor also led to significant wage increases. Diversified agricultural production also benefitted townspeople and heightened interest in luxury goods resulted in a better standard of living for survivors. However, increased competition among and within guilds (corporations of medieval craftsmen) and with non-guild businesses resulted in guild masters trying to control market through monopolies and restrictions on guild membership. Women were increasingly denied access to guild membership. Opportunities were available for survivors when vacancies appeared in city governments and businesses; nonetheless, there seems to have been more conflict in communal relations.
Effect on landed nobility. Overall, the landed nobility in the role of landowners declined in the later middle ages. They were forced to pay higher wages and lower their rents. Costs were not offset by agricultural production, which was still inefficient. Practically all nobles, from the high-and-mighty to down-and-outers, felt the economic squeeze of depressed land value in the face of the growing fiscal power of towns.
Topic 12: Peasant Life and Women in the Later Middle Ages
Overview and Reading Assignment
Well into the eighteenth century in pre-industrial Europe, nearly eight out of every ten people tilled the soil, and it was hard work. For generation after generation, age after age, economic life was dominated by toil. Every activity was labor intensive. Everything that was consumed was pulled, pushed, or lifted. Nature and human strength set the boundaries on productivity.
There were a number of reasons why agricultural production was restricted. In the first place, there was little incentive for the peasantry to change it. Almost every commodity produced in the village was perishable, and unless it could be consumed or converted at market into durable goods or cash it was worthless. Secondly, farming was conservative business. Decisions were reached by villagers in common or dictated by landlords. The old ways seemed good enough—why change? Peasants knew nothing of scientific breeding techniques. Animals lived together in common pasture. Thirdly, as much as three-fourths of the produce harvested by peasants was lost to rents, fees, and tithes. Nonetheless, peasant life in the Later Middle Ages was changing remarkably from past patterns, especially in certain geographic areas.
Also in this topic, peasant and urban women's experiences are considered as well as attitudes about women and procreation. Evidence of these attitudes comes from 'learned' culture, that is, the opinions of educated men, based on ancient sources and from the Catholic clergy.
In conjunction with this topic one should read in Hunt, et al., The Making of the West, Vol. I: To 1740, 2nd ed., pp. 494-96, 601-3.
XII. Peasant Life and Women in the Late Middle Ages
A. Differences in the Landscape. So much more of the land by the Late Middle Ages had been brought under cultivation. Marshes and swamps had been drained in many places. The plowed fields were surely larger than in the medieval past. More and more Europeans were using a three-field crop rotation system. Paths and roads were worn deeper into the ground. There would have been more enclosed areas, either for sheep or for fields.
There was considerable deforestation in parts of England and elsewhere. The countryside was dotted with more mills and windmills in England and northwestern Europe. The size of villages grew. In the Middle Ages many villages included less than one hundred people; by the early modern period villages tended to contain 500 or more people. More dramatic would have been the increase in the number of towns. In Flanders (modern-day Holland and Belgium) and northern Italy, perhaps 30+% of the population lived in towns.
B. Differences in Peasant Society. In the High Middle Ages, peasant society was fairly homogenous. Those at the bottom of the scale, slaves, had been freed by the end of the eleventh century. On the other end, in England, and other parts of western Europe, the peasants at the top of the scale lost rights and status as they were incorporated into the feudal and manorial systems. More and more peasants fell under the administration of feudal lords, and this tended to lower them to a common denominator of status and income.
Then the plague struck, and as was discussed earlier, if one survived, more opportunities were available in western Europe. Faced with a depleted labor supply, the lords of medieval manors were forced to grant far better terms to peasants. The peasant's most valuable asset, his labor, was suddenly placed at a premium, and he could use it to win his legal and economic freedom. As the years passed, lords of manors found it easier to pay wages than to enforce personal service or labor statutes. Thus the peasant class was dramatically altered over the course of the fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries. With higher wages and lower rents, a peasant family might secure several more strips in the lord's demesne. These peasants might reach the status of substantial landed proprietors. Some of them even rose to be lords of the manor in their own right, and as a group they soon began to compete with the lower fringes of the knightly class. Or, if one's gamble did not pay off, then one had to work as a wage laborer, occasionally renting land, but generally working the soil for wages paid them by the lord or yeomen of the manor. Most peasants fit somewhere in between these boom or bust extremes.
About 1380, perhaps one-third to one-half of the peasant population in England remained in a limited state of serfdom, owing personal service to the lord of the manor, obliged to pay death and inheritance taxes and other financial exactions, and still legally bound to the land. By the sixteenth century, dramatic changes had occurred; by 1500 serfdom was practically defunct in England. Serfs had been replaced by three groups: 1) the wage-earning rural proletariat who were free but landless; 2) free customary tenants who paid rent but had a right to bequeath and inherit their land "according to the custom of the manor"; and 3) the freeholders who had become in fact, if not yet in theory, owners of land that owed no service. In England and elsewhere, there were not many who belonged to the last group.
The sketch of changes is less distinct in France and Germany, where remnants of serfdom remained. Although more of their feudal services had been commuted into money payments, they were still subject to the corvee, or labor service on roads, etc. in France. It seems that the percentage of French peasants working as day laborers was less than in England in the sixteenth century. One has the impression that more of them had at least some claim to strips of land, based on research that has shown that the French peasantry lost considerable amounts of land through the course of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The end result was that in seventeenth-century lower Brittany, France, peasants owned only 11% of the land. Around Paris, the percentage rises to twenty-five. Only estimates are possible, but it appears that in France in the early 1700s, peasants owned 35% of the land, nobles and bourgeois 50%, and the church 10-15%. It seems that 90% of French peasants in the 17th and 18th centuries were day laborers, working for richer peasants or noble landowners. Of these people, many were in severe poverty. How did so many people survive living off such small plots of land? It appears that income from domestic industries compensated for the loss of agricultural production.
In most cases, French nobles claimed sole ownership of the mills used in villages, plus, the streams, rivers, and woodlands. Up until the mid-17th century, the nobles also controlled the courts to which peasants had to address their cases. After 1660, more peasants could take their grievances to royal courts, where they were more likely to get a fairer hearing and speedier trial. Seigniorial rights and privileges were not completely abolished until the French Revolution (August 1789). Through acts passed in 1798, 1808 and finally in 1816, all Prussian (northern Germany) peasants were freed; they were not emancipated in Austria until 1848, in Russia 1861.
C. Village Life. Late medieval villages, like early modern ones, were isolated. Roads were bad and few; thus travel was limited, costly, and dangerous. Travel conditions remained poor until the mid-19th century with the advent of the locomotive; indeed, travel was safer and faster in the days of the Roman empire than in medieval or early modern Europe. Most people did not move; their village was the center of their world. On the plus side, the government official had a difficult time extending the intrusive arm of the king's court into the countryside.
While travel was difficult, it cannot be assumed that people were not moving about. Evidence from Tudor England, implies that there were large numbers of vagrants; the same was true in France. A French writer in the 17th century claimed that one in ten lived as beggars. Still, perhaps it is accurate to say that the majority of people did not move great distances.
Villages were self-sufficient. Village women wove and spun the cloth and wool and sewed it into clothes. They prepared the food and made the beer. Men made the implements for the home and fields during bad weather in the winter. The village blacksmith forged a few tools. Wages were low; ca. 1500 the average annual income for English peasants was 5£.
In contrast to their early modern descendants, who were more closely supervised after the Protestant and Catholic reformations, late medieval villagers had more festivals and holidays. Almost two days of the week were designated for worship—Sundays and 'holy days,' which might as well have been holidays. There were fairs and secular celebrations as well. These celebrations, sacred and secular, were held around the parish church. The village priest played a crucial role in the villagers' lives, baptizing infants, presiding at marriages and burials, hearing confessions, and regularly celebrating the Mass. The church was likely to be painted inside with scenes from the Bible or the lives of local patron saints. As Pope Gregory I had said, "images and paintings were books for the illiterate."
The church also doubled as a village meeting hall. And despite canonical prohibitions, the villagers used the building on festival days for dancing, drinking, and revelry. The feast days of the Christian calendar—Christmas, Easter, and many lesser holy days—provided joyous relief from an otherwise grinding routine. Throughout the year, villagers found time for the informal sports of wrestling, archery, cock fights, and drinking contests.
In England, most villagers lived in hovels made of stones piled up and covered with thatch or brushwood. A few wooden homes might still be found. Bricks were not used until the late eighteenth century. Cottages were small, consisting of one living room and one bedroom. Windows did not have glass, and the floor was often made of beaten earth covered with straw.
The basic unit of society in western and northern Europe was the nuclear family—father, mother, and children and this unit held sway long before the Industrial Revolution. In the higher social strata, the family included a number of unmarried live-in household servants. Many families of farmers, merchants, tradesmen, and artisans also included live-in servants, apprentices and possibly a few slaves, especially in Mediterranean lands.
Admittedly a nuclear family might last for only a few years. Young men were not encouraged to marry until they could afford to set up a household with wife and children. In northwestern Europe, farmers and journeymen tended to marry in their mid-twenties, with their wives a year or two younger. In southern and eastern Europe, in some cases marriage was performed between teenagers, who continued to live with one set of parents for a time, or between a man in his late twenties to early thirties with a much younger woman. In early modern Italian cities, men married about the age of thirty, women fifteen.
The primary function of marriage was to obtain children. Scholars do not agree on the number of pregnancies that most women endured; averages range from 5 to 6 to as high as 15; most scholars indicate that most women had 4-5 children born. Nor do scholars agree about mortality rates for women giving birth; figures range from 1-10%. Marrying late meant fewer pregnancies, plus disease and poor nutrition surely affected the number of times a woman conceived. Infant mortality rates were high. In England, more than one in eight died in their first year, and about one in four died before reaching the age of ten. In France, during the seventeenth century, one-quarter of all children died before their first birthday, and another quarter failed to reach the age of twenty. Not only did many children die young, also children left home much earlier than in modern times. The children of yeomen (freeholders) and merchants would often be sent away to work as apprentices in shops. In order to receive an education, yeomen's sons would usually have had to leave home to attend school. The children of laborers were expected to start work as early as age six in the household or in domestic manufacture. Not only children were absent. Most children experienced the death of at least one parent fairly early in life; by the time they reached the age of twenty-five, most would have lost one or both parents. The average person lived about thirty to forty years.
The nuclear family was only the norm in northwestern Europe. Elsewhere in southern France, northern Italy, central Europe and especially Russia and the Balkans, stem-family households (more than two generations in direct line) and multiple-family households were more prominent.
D. Peasant Women. Peasant women worked just as hard as the men, plus their lives were so much more complicated because they birthed and took care of children. Consider the life of peasant women from birth to death. There is some evidence that Europeans practiced infanticide, and invariably female babies would have been more prone to abandonment than males. Girls significantly outnumbered boys in orphanages.
Historians debate as to when children were 'discovered,' that is, when Europeans began to distinguish children and childhood from adults and adulthood. Some contend that through the course of the Middle Ages, children were becoming increasingly more important to medieval people, especially urban inhabitants. At least in late medieval times, many artists and humanists were cognizant of children as children. They no longer overlooked children, nor viewed them as simply miniature adults. Peasant attitudes are more difficult to assess, but considering how easily child labor was exploited in the early industrial revolution, it would appear that peasant families did not have the luxury or resources to dote over their children.
It is difficult to tell if boys and girls in the first years of life were treated differently. Children were dressed alike for the first several years of life — no color distinctions. It was at age five or so that distinctions between genders were made. Girls, from all social classes, were taught skills related to the household (cooking, sewing, spinning), while boys might begin rudimentary education in reading and writing, especially in noble and mercantile families.
Female babies grew into girls, but late medieval girls did not grow into young women as quickly as their modern sisters do. Just as in days of the Industrial Revolution, the age of puberty was about fifteen and a half or older; today it is generally at thirteen. Diet and other environmental factors affected the onset of menstruation. Because the actual biological function of menstruation was unknown, people in the Late Middle Ages considered it either as a process that purified the blood or as nature's way of removing excess blood. The cessation of menstruation was seen as extremely perilous. It might mean that impure blood would collect in the woman's body. All kinds of remedies were recommended to restore the flow.
Peasant women performed practically all the same kinds of work that men performed, especially at harvest time, although they were less likely to do heavy plowing. Besides the labor performed in the fields, peasant women were responsible for all the domestic work. Lisa Bitel remarks that peasant women in the high middle ages would have seen the same faces so much more frequently than men. Their network of relatives, friends, or acquaintances would have been more restricted than men's. They were not permitted in as many public places and would have spent more time at home.
E. Urban Women. The life of peasant women was hard, but at least her husband shared equally in a life of toil; they were partners. In general, urban women's lives were more affected by marriage, specifically the status of one's husband. Her marriage determined how she would be viewed by society. In other words, her own accomplishments did not decide how she would be seen socially or politically. To a great extent a woman's position in society was pigeonholed according to the status of her husband, dead or alive.
If a woman married a merchant or the owner of an important craft, she was expected (perhaps forced) to remain home, manage domestic servants, tend to the children, and prepare the home to suit her businessman-husband. Upper- and middle-class mates were chosen not for romantic reasons, but on the basis of more pragmatic concerns. In some major towns, second and third daughters of wealthy families were compelled to enter convents; a family would thus save on dowry expenses. Somewhat secluded in monasteries, these daughters could not harm the family reputation, plus they could maintain a comfortable lifestyle.
Lower class women were immersed in retail sales of small, less expensive goods like wooden utensils, soap, smaller stands selling vegetables, eggs, etc. From the beginning of the late medieval period, more and more restrictions were placed on women’s economic activities. When the towns in the 11th and 12th centuries were in the midst of vibrant growth, husbands and wives contributed to the economic surge. Wives helped run shops, experiment with new means of production, keep records and so forth. Widows were allowed to maintain a husband's business. In the course of the late medieval era, widows were forced to remarry, if they wanted to keep their business.
By the late medieval period, women's economic opportunities and activities were more restricted. With the recovery in population from the Black Death devastation, more workers were available, which led to more competition for jobs. Women's status was adversely affected as well by the ongoing transition from the manorial system to domestic industry, from barter economies to money economies. Limited inflation hit in the late 16th century. There were bad harvests and periodic famines, all of which contributed to considerable economic turmoil. In the midst of these troubles, authorities reacted conservatively, attempting to gain control over market forces. Guild corporations stiffened regulations that continued to suppress the journeymen, the older workers in shops but not masters. They in turn vented their frustrations against women, whom they viewed as competitors. Women simply could not compete, especially since they were denied access to one of the great economic boosters, education, which topic will also be discussed later.
Intellectual currents negatively impacted women. The resurgence of polarity arguments, traceable to Greek and Roman authorities, almost always attributed unfavorable characteristics to the female gender. Because these arguments cited ancient authorities, they were ascribed great weight. The arguments were easy to follow and expand. Scholastic authors such as Thomas Aquinas proposed these viewpoints. And since women were not allowed to attend cathedral or university schools, they could not refute these misogynist constructs. Moreover, since women were not allowed university education they could not enter the growing ranks of bureaucrats, judges, and other professional occupations, while these professionals were indoctrinated with misogynist teachings. Aristotelian research on women was so simplistic that the topic of 'female' or of female physiology was deemed uninteresting or unimportant.
This discussion about late medieval urban women should not be left without mentioning the significant number of slaves in Mediterranean Europe. Middle-class households often had one domestic slave, usually a girl. Before 1500, these women might come from Spain, Africa, the Balkans, or Constantinople, but mostly from the Black Sea region. They often worked as indentured servants. Their salary was the dowry given to them after their term of service and successful negotiations of a marriage.