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A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344
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6 Reddit comments about A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344:

u/labarge3 · 164 pointsr/AskHistorians

This is a tough question to answer with any degree of specificity because there was a plurality of experiences for peasants across Europe and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. However, in general, the economic life of medieval peasants was perilous. Subsistence agriculture provides little job security. A bad harvest could spell devastation for you, your family, and your community. I suggest taking a look at the online English translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for evidence of famine/drought/general devastation in the British Isles. Here are a few examples from just the eleventh century - a time when the Commercial Revolution (which brought substantial increases in agricultural production and peasant populations) was beginning to take hold:

A.D. 1005… This year died Archbishop Elfric; and Bishop Elfeah succeeded him in the archbishopric. This year was the great famine in England so severe that no man ere remembered such.

A.D. 1070… There was a great famine this year.

A.D. 1082. This year the king seized Bishop Odo; and this year also was a great famine.

A.D. 1087. After the birth of our Lord and Saviour Christ, one thousand and eighty-seven winters; in the one and twentieth year after William began to govern and direct England, as God granted him, was a very heavy and pestilent season in this land. Such a sickness came on men, that full nigh every other man was in the worst disorder, that is, in the diarrhoea; and that so dreadfully, that many men died in the disorder. Afterwards came, through the badness of the weather as we before mentioned, so great a famine over all England, that many hundreds of men died a miserable death through hunger. Alas! how wretched and how rueful a time was there! When the poor wretches lay full nigh driven to death prematurely, and afterwards came sharp hunger, and dispatched them withall! Who will not be penetrated with grief at such a season? or who is so hardhearted as not to weep at such misfortune? Yet such things happen for folks' sins, that they will not love God and righteousness.

We do not have census data or detailed tax records to corroborate the extent of these famines, but we nonetheless have to assume that they were disruptive to peasants living off the English land. Entries like these from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are echoed across other Latin chronicles and in Arabic ones as well. I am most familiar with The Complete History of Ibn al-Athir, which mentions numerous famines across the Islamicate World. Take, for example, his account of a long-lasting famine in Ifriqiya (roughly modern Tunisia) in the 1140s:

It had a terrible effect on the population, who even resorted to cannibalism. Because of starvation the nomads sought out the towns and the townspeople closed the gates against them. Plague and great mortality followed. The country was emptied and from whole families not a single person survived. Many people travelled to Sicily in search of food and met with great hardship.

Since medieval sources tend to be written from the perspective of literate men based in cities or monasteries, the perspective of peasants is often only briefly mentioned. It is likewise difficult to make any concrete estimations about lifespan, infant mortality rate, and nutrition for most medieval peasant communities due to lack of sources (although the picture begins to come into focus during the Early Modern Period). When we read about a “great famine” in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or The Complete History of Ibn al-Athir, we therefore have to imagine that a bad harvest - caused potentially by drought, an early frost, heavy rains, or conflict - brought with it immense human suffering and the displacement of communities from their ancestral homes.

This is not to say that peasant life was only defined by suffering at the hands of subsistence agriculture and overly aggressive landed elites. We know that there were robust and complex communities in rural medieval villages, many of which survived the ordeals brought by mother nature. I recommend Judith Bennett’s biography of Cecilia Penifader as a microhistory of peasant life in the English town of Brigstock during the late-thirteenth through mid-fourteenth centuries.

For those interested in environmental data related to medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, I highly recommend the Old World Drought Atlas, which uses dendrochronological (tree-ring) data to chart annual rainfall across the region. This link shows annual rainfall in Europe in 1315, the first year of The Great Famine in Europe. As the link shows, there was abnormally heavy rainfall across Western Europe. This corroborates written sources, which detail how heavy rains destroyed harvests and had profoundly negative consequences for peasants.

u/DrKarenDempsey · 76 pointsr/AskHistorians

Feminism as it currently exists today was not present in the medieval period. What we can talk about is female agency. In other words how women acted within the constraints of a patriarchal society either as individuals or as a group. Acts of subversion can be seen in a number of ways. I have mentioned a few times on here about how women could not participate fully in the church- they were forbidden to touch the alter. However, many women donated their clothes, or made personalised alter clothes for the church or priests. This meant that clothes that has touched them, that they had owned or made and perhaps worn on their body eventually came to wrap the alter - one of the most sacred parts of the church. Or touched the body of the clergyman they donated it too. While we cannot say that this was a feminist act it was certainly a way of cleverly avoiding the ban on touching (even if by proxy!).

Another, perhaps more obvious way, was that many women who were married once and became widows chose to stay that way. They elected not to remarry. Widows had a special place in society - they almost operated as men, especially in relation to property and wealth.

There are of course unmarried or single women who equally chose to live that way (a wonderful book on Cecila Penifader by Judith Bennettt https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Life-Penifader-Brigstock-1295-1344/dp/0072903317 shows one such (well off) peasant woman. This is a super book! I return to it again and again. Also, work by Dr Cordelia Beattie discusses single women Beattie, C. (2007) Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dr Beattie has a range of really informative publications on medieval women!

u/gshenck · 23 pointsr/AskHistorians

I'd reccommend reading A Medieval Life, which uses both outside research and a very fortunate abundance of local court records to piece together the life of a single villain from England. http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Life-Penifader-Brigstock-1295-1344/dp/0072903317

The book makes it very clear several times that she isn't representative of all peasants simply because they were so diverse across Europe, but one thing I recall it pointing out is that there were indeed a substantial number of 'holidays', all based around the church calendar. Several large feasts around christmas and easter, as well as a long succession in the summer, along with a multitude of single day feasts throughout the year, plus you would have the sabbath.

It makes it clear that while she had hardships, it wasn't as bad as commonly imagined for many, if not most, in the lower class. If you made it past childhood you would likely live a fairly decent life (average lifespans are heavily skewed by the huge infant mortality rate), and the work itself wasn't for many as bad as commonly portrayed in modern fiction.

u/Gaimar · 6 pointsr/AskHistorians

Peasants were the largest demographic group in Latin Christendom, comprising somewhere around ninety percent of the population or more. Most of these people were tenant farmers who leased a portion of a larger slice of land in return for a rent of service, kind, or money (although the latter is more rare and often only found in the later Middle Ages). These people could theoretically support themselves and their family off their own land. Some of these peasants were not free—serfs—meaning, depending on when and where they lived, they may be bound to the land that they worked and could not seek legal redress outside of their primary lord (the kings justice, for example, would have been beyond the reach of these people). All of this is to say that medieval peasants, even if serfs, were not slaves—a misconception that comes from the continued use in some medieval sources of the Roman word for slave, servus, and should not be taken as a indicator of shared meaning. I've seen documents that use servus, rusticus, and—in the vernacular Old French—vilain. Outside of what they needed to pay as part of their obligation, they were free to sell, trade, or work elsewhere in the hamlet or town for wage or kind.

The details for the sort of trade you are asking about is difficult to trace since the economic lives of most peasants only appear in the records of lords and local courts when they have some sort of legal problem or reach a certain level of wealth. The community in which most medieval peasants would have interacted and traded was the Parish, which—besides the family—is the basic unit for understanding peasant society. The Parish community would have operated as a sort of social nexus for the rural peasantry, through which small transactions would have been negotiated. Work/Trade for wage and work for kind probably occurred simultaneously based on need, although certain economic historians believe quite strongly that the latter wouldn't have occurred at certain points of economic crisis.

Most farming hamlets were largely self sufficient in respect to their daily needs, so the average peasant had no need to access the sort of long distance trade I think you might be imagining. This is easier to understand when you consider what we know about their eating habits. For most, diet was simple and with the exception of certain feast days fish or meat was largely a luxury most peasants could not afford. The bulk of peasant diet probably came from cereals, supplemented by whatever local herbs and vegetables that they grew in their personal garden, of which every farm was sure to have at least one. On the plus side, beer was plentiful, although it was usually not brewed at a high ABV. A quirky and active market in late medieval England was in beer, which often was brewed by women and sold ad-hoc as a means to supplement income.

I should add that the definition of peasantry is something of a thorny topic for medieval economic historians, particularly in England where they have a wealth of sources that give them a wide range of local practice to squabble about. For your purposes, I would recommend avoiding most of these debates and read Judith Bennett's A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344, a slender volume that will give you a good general overview of medieval peasant life rich with economic detail. For a contemporary, non-economic view of French peasant life I would recommend Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, that chronicles life in a small southern French town through inquisitional records and provides small details about how peasants moved through the world, made friendships, and even weird things like their perception of time. A wonderful view of life peasant life a few centuries later is presented in the first few chapters of Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2003), a book that, although about religious change, gives insight into the everyday.

edit: spelling words.

u/SetPhasersToStupid · 3 pointsr/worldnews

This is not the case. We have a very good documentation about peasants' lives. It's not as plentiful as other periods, but we still have many accounts.

E.g.,

https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Life-Penifader-Brigstock-1295-1344/dp/0072903317

u/Whoosier · 2 pointsr/AskHistorians

I’m recommending books meant for general readers here. If you want something more in-depth, I’ll be happy to supply it.

For military matters, a very approachable overview by a historian of medieval military matters is Michael Prestwich’s [Knight: The Medieval Warrior’s (Unofficial) Manual] (http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Medieval-Warriors-Unofficial-Manual/dp/0500251606) (2010).

For urban life, there is a heavily illustrated survey by Chiara Frigoni, [A Day in a Medieval City] (http://www.amazon.com/Day-Medieval-City-Chiara-Frugoni/dp/0226266354) (2005).

For the life of common people, a brief but very informative look is Judith Bennett’s [A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295-1344] (http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Life-Penifader-Brigstock-1295-1344/dp/0072903317) (1998), which explains what life in an English village would be like. Much older (1937), outdated in many respects, but still very readable is H. S. Bennett’s (no relation) [Life on an English Manor] (http://archive.org/details/lifeontheenglish020976mbp) here in a free e-book link but also available second hand.