The Ties that Bound

Peasant Families in Medieval England

By: Barbara A. Hanawalt

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Paperback | 1 February 1989

At a Glance

Paperback
360 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 2.03

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Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions.

Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

Industry Reviews

`The first comprehensive account of peasant famiies in late medieval England.' Journal of Social History `As stimulating for the questions it asks as for the answers it provides.' New York Times Book Review 'She has endeavoured to search for the continuities. This approach and its detail of everyday mediaeval life make the book of interest to a wide variety of readers. Those who are interested in the mediaeval period (or the family) should not miss it.' Win Grimmette, Open History

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