Growing up in medieval London : the experience of childhood in history PDF
Preview Growing up in medieval London : the experience of childhood in history
Growing Up in Medieval London GROWING UP IN MEDIEVAL LONDON The Experience of Childhood in History BARBARA A. HANAWALT OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York Oxford Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc. First published in 1993 by Oxford University Press, Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1995 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanawalt, Barbara. Growing up in medieval London: the experience of childhood in history Barbara A. Hanawalt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-508405-5 ISBN-IS 978-0-19-509384-1 ISBN 0-19-509384-4 (pbk.) 1. Children—England—London—History. 2. Youth—England—London—History. I. Title. HQ792.G7H27 1993 305.23'09421'2—dc20 92-45682 8 10 9 7 Printed in the United States of America . . . We may begin with children's sports, Seeing we all have been children. John Stow's version of Fitzstephen's description of London, in The Survey of London This page intentionally left blank Prefcace The pleasures of being a modern historian consist in two activities: the archival research and the presentation of a coherent story. History is a remarkably flexible discipline in that it permits a number of ways to tell its tale and, at its best, uses the devices most suited to the types of sources that must carry on the narrative. To think of narrative as being only a progres- sion of events that tells the outcome of an election, a battle, a struggle for liberty, or a murder trial is too limited. Historians construct narratives through pictures, tables, regression analysis, and even chaos-theory models. The one constant in spinning out or computer-generating or imagining the historical past is that all historians who try to create a coher- ent narrative start with data from the past. They do not, as a philosopher might, posit a past and argue from it or, as a novelist might, create an imaginary past and people it with characters. Historians are trained to footnote the past. This process is a constraining art, a bit like writing a sonnet. It is a damn hard way to write fiction. This book explores a variety of techniques for telling the story of growing up in medieval London all of which are footnoted. In the process of interpretation, historians seldom claim in these "postpositivist" days that they are writing "historical truths" that are devoid of the interpretations of individual writers or the times in which they live. One of the secondary comforts of history is that it can always be rewritten for a new time by another historian who takes a fresh look at the archival materials. It is a very comforting profession because it is hard to be scooped and hard to be obsolete. On the other hand, it is hard to have the last word and become a classic. Although some historians set themselves up as arbiters of the best viii Preface forms for telling a historical tale and urge earnest young historians to avoid some types of arguments, the nature of the sources and the material they contain are the truest guide in reconstructing the past as clearly and, one hopes, as faithfully to the events as possible. Some devices are better for some sources than others. It is, for instance, pointless to ignore the possibilities of quantification in repetitive records, such as court cases, censuses, parish registers, and tax listings, and instead to pull out the remarkable case and develop an atypical narrative on this basis without looking at what the average occurrences were. Thus to build demographic history on "woman gives birth to triplets" tells us little about ordinary birth patterns, other than that this one configuration made headlines in a medi- eval chronicle or a modern newspaper. Likewise, interpretations of the cultural significance of such an unusual event fall short without some investigation into how a society might view multiple births. The more we wish to penetrate into the lives of ordinary people, the more complex our use of sources becomes. With this increasing complex- ity, the challenge of writing and of holding the attention of nonspecialists becomes even greater. Historians must learn to reach out to a broader readership among an interested public in order to keep the discipline alive. Keeping in mind multiple audiences and diverse sources, I have chosen a variety of narrative styles to spell out the history of London's children and youth. Some of the archival material is remarkable for its laborious record- ing of repetitive detail and is more readily accessible in numerical and tabular form. The wardship accounts, for instance, record the orphans, their names, their fortunes, and the person awarded wardship. None of the clerks, scribes, or city officials went back and did a tabulation of what was happening to city orphans in the aggregate. They used their archives to trace individual orphans, and individuals wishing to locate a particular orphan could ask that the record be searched. But none of the city officials issued numerical statements taking note of the peculiar fact that there were fewer female than male orphans in the wardship records or that the value of holdings that accrued to orphans had risen subsantially during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Indeed, China today would not know of its shortfall of females compared with males if the World Health Organization did not ferret out the information. We are very concerned these days with forms of historical argument. Some find it hard to conceive of a context for numbers. Historical data in numerical form are convincing in many ways, but we feel an unease with them. If these people did not use numbers in the same way as we do, should we use numbers because they present only part of the picture? Others argue that we are violating history by using terms such as "feudal- ism" and "adolescence" in discussions of the medieval period because they Preface ix imply modern behavior that was not equivalent to the medieval practice. The argument against such a "purist" position is much the same as that against those who oppose numerical analyses. We try to write history in terms that are understandable to us, but we are not writing fiction. We cannot put ourselves back into that past, but we have terms and analytical tools that are useful to us and should not be dismissed lightly. If, to purists of the historical profession, numerical data, as full of gaps as they are, and the use of modern terms such as "adolescence" are taboo, what are such purists to say to the composite characters and short stories about them that appear in this text? Can historians presume, on the basis of hours of research and a full life of study, to construct characters and short stories that are only partly to be found in the records? I came to the experimentation with narrative in the course of archival work. I thought that the material was so disparate, having been collected from so many different records, that it might be hard to follow. At the time, I was reading A. J. P. Taylor's autobiography for relaxation, and I was struck by his comment that social history is harder to write than political or diplo- matic history because it lacks an immediate narrative. But books that I have much admired, such as Eileen Power's Medieval People and Jonathan Spence's The Death of Woman Wang, interlace larger social histories with individual biographies and tales. Whereas Spence has envied my access to quantitative data from abundant sources that are not available for an equivalent period of Chinese history, I have envied his ready-made short stories from contemporary writers' pens. So I have turned the tables. I have used my superior data and have written my own narratives, which are based on the lives of real people but which are made up of composite experiences. The narratives are set off by quotation marks so as to be readily recognizable. The chapters tell a traditional historical narrative without these explorations of individual experiences. The stories summarize information in the chapters. They also serve to redress an imbalance in the records. We always know more about the elite and about middle-class males because they leave records, are involved in disputes, run the government and the economy, and so on. We often know only bits and pieces about the poor and the women and children. The composite stories help to bring a completeness to sparse and scattered narratives that would otherwise be missing. In this regard, they are much like quantitative narratives or those based on more traditional methods of putting archival materials into a framework for the public to read and enjoy. Minneapolis B. A. H. January 1993
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