Normal Women, page 9
The noble heroines took active roles in the early stories. In the earliest tales they defended their husbands or lovers and physically fought against their enemies. They could disguise themselves as knights, go adventuring and even court other women while disguised as a man. In the Roman d’Enéas, the heroine, Camille, leads a troop of women in battle against the Trojans; in the German tale The Ladies’ Tournament, the women joust with each other; in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the women are Amazons, fighting men before they join the court; and in the Chanson de Guillaume, two women of authority appear, one maintaining a castle in a war zone and managing its defence, the other a queen who advises her husband. These commanding, active, powerful heroines were a complete contradiction to the inferior women described by the classic writers and the early churchmen.
As courtly love came to dominate the arts and entertainment of the medieval world, the two contradictory versions of the nature of women – bawdy, earthy woman and ethereal lady – were affirmed and retold until they became universally accepted, even by women themselves, who then tried to live up to them. Any idea of sisterhood, even womanhood, was riven by this division of women. No longer could a woman merely ‘do’ or merely ‘be’: she must choose one role or another and then stay within it. From now on, a woman must be either ‘naturally’ a frigid lady, superior to all others and above earthly desires, or ‘naturally’ an obedient, inferior, sexually active commoner – and the biggest and most significant indicator of a woman’s nature was whether or not she was readily available for sex with a man.
Part 2
1348–1455
Women Rising
The Great Pestilence
A deadly virus, later named ‘the Black Death’ but known at the time as ‘the Great Pestilence’, arrived in England in 1348. The epidemic started in East Asia and spread across all of Europe along the trade routes. It was a form of bubonic plague, but to those it afflicted the cause was a terrifying mystery and there was no known cure. The first outbreaks proved the worst: bringing the Hundred Years’ War with France to a halt, destroying cultural life, severing connections between England and Europe, emptying villages and fields, damaging the church – which had neither doctrine nor priests to offer hope. Every aspect of life in England was transformed by widespread deaths, as the population halved: from 5 million people in 1300 to 2.5 million in 1400,1 with 30–40 per cent dying in the first year alone.2 In the towns the workshops stood empty, as masters and apprentices fled to the country if they could or died in their thousands. In the country people died alone in their cottages; villages tried to exclude travellers, but the plague seemed unstoppable. The impact was extraordinary – scientists have even suggested that so many farmers died that agricultural land reverted to forest, cooling the climate and creating the later ‘Little Ice Age’ of the seventeenth century.3
The most important consequence of the plague for women is not remarked in the histories. In these desperate years, women were called on to serve the church as if they were ordained male priests. In January 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, ordered dying Christians to confess their sins to a layman if no priest was available; and if no layman was available, the patient might confess and receive the last rites from a woman. He said:
The plague . . . has left many parish churches . . . without parson or priest to care for their parishioners . . . Therefore, to provide for the salvation of souls . . . you should at once publicly command and persuade all men that, if they are on the point of death and cannot secure the services of a priest, then they should make confession to each other . . . if no man is present, then even to a woman.4
‘Even to a woman’! It was an extraordinary, almost-forgotten breakthrough into the men-only priesthood. The significance is that by allowing women (as a last resort) to hear the confession of a dying man, Bishop Ralph implied that women could intercede with God – just like men. Women had a voice that God could hear – they were not the ‘second sex’; they could intercede with God as well as a man. This extraordinary transformation of women from inferior creatures, into God-blessed beings, did not last beyond the plague years, and Bishop Ralph’s admission of female spiritual equality would never be repeated by the Roman Catholic Church. Six hundred years later, the Church of England finally agreed that women could be ordained as priests.
As the plague took its toll, the deaths overwhelmed the church. Life in convents and abbeys collapsed, with no one to farm their fields, nor run their industries, nor collect their rents. Their infirmaries had nothing to offer; patients died, and nurses and physicians contracted the disease. Orphan children and the poor were abandoned by the religious houses that could not feed themselves. The smaller convents fell into abject poverty.5 Women leaders, skilled practitioners and labourers died, and surviving nuns deserted failing nunneries and never returned. By 1500, only two large houses survived, at Shaftesbury and Syon. More than 100 had closed. Many of the convents – especially those of Benedictines – shrunk into small domestic groups of four or five women; other nuns returned to their parents, married or tried to fit into the secular world.6
But surviving women in town and country found new opportunities. Those in the country were freed from the supervision of the lord of the manor or his agents. Taxpayers could refuse to pay taxes, many collectors were dead and the government recognised the breakdown of the system by reducing taxes in the post-plague years. Rent collectors were dead and surviving tenants could not be forced into onerous leases; they might walk away to a better lord in an empty manor or even find an abandoned farm.7 Women survivors in the towns might be the only ones able to continue a business or the only heirs to property. There were not enough workers to fill vacancies; male and female labourers could set their own wages.
Olivia Cranmer, in the village of Walsham le Willows, Suffolk, rose from the lowest class – the daughter of a serf and so even lower status than a serf – a single mother who was probably ordered to marry to force the father to support her bastard. When the Great Pestilence came to her village, 119 men died in the two months of May and June 1349, as did unrecorded numbers of women and children. Olivia’s grandfather, father, brother and husband all died, leaving Olivia as the only surviving heir to the family plot of land and the tenancy. As the feudal system collapsed around her, she was no longer named as a serf, and new freedoms opened up for her. She farmed her own plot, made a profit, expanded her business and even rented or bought land, increasing her landholding to such an extent that she could lease surplus land to a tenant of her own. Her tenant’s rent paid her for her old age. She never remarried and lived into her seventies, a farmer, businesswoman and entrepreneur.8
The pestilence created a nationwide shortage of labour. There were not enough workers even to harvest the crops in the fields. Surviving women labourers probably made up as much as 50 per cent of the workforce and were so much in demand that they earned equal pay with men.9 Wages were still paid by the task, not according to the sex of the worker, and women in skilled arduous trades such as thatching and reaping worked alongside men, equally productive and paid at the same rate.10
Higher wages drew women from working in home production into wage work and into trades and business.11 The next 200 years saw them taking home equal pay with men, competing with men for casual work, continuing with their own domestic production of food and textiles, entering apprenticeships and training and so rising into higher-paid work. Women moved from rural tenancies into urban areas to seize entrepreneurial opportunities: in some towns they outnumbered men.12 Women stepped into businesses or fortunes of dead husbands or parents, like Agnes Ramsey who inherited her father William’s design and building business in London in 1349 and became a leading architect: contracted by Queen Isabella to design her £100 tomb in Greyfriars Church in the capital.13
Mathilda Penne ran her husband’s business as a skinner for 12 years after his death; she trained her own apprentices and employed male servants and, possibly, a female scrivener to keep the accounts. Johanna Hill (d. 1441) inherited the bell foundry at Aldgate from her husband. She trained four male apprentices and the daughter of a fellow bell-founder, as well as employing two female servants, 10 male servants, a specialised bell-maker and a clerk.14
Successful women entrepreneurs used the law in their own names: in 1368, Emma Saltere of London sued Thomas Blankowe and Alice Breton for a huge debt of 52 shillings. When they did not appear in court to answer for their debt, she gained 32s 6d in goods: a fur-trimmed blue coat, a chest and a mattress with coverlet tester and linens. Maud Ireland traded as a femme sole silkwoman even though her husband Thomas was so successful that he was a London alderman in 1380. She represented herself when she was sued by an Italian silk merchant in a dispute over some white silk.15
The numbers of girls taking up trade apprenticeships soared in the decades after the pestilence – a third of the names in the surviving records are those of girls. Most were bound to masters by their fathers, planning a career for their girls. Robert de Ramseye, a fishmonger who died in 1373, left 20 shillings to his daughter, Elizabeth – for her marriage and for ‘putting her to a trade’. One woman made her own apprenticeship agreement, travelling from Sussex to London to enter a contract with a woman master.16
These were genuine apprenticeships to genuine trades, entered in the guild rolls, supervised by the guilds, providing a training of seven years to learn the skills of the craft and graduation as a registered craftsman with guild membership. Many of the women apprentices entered the textile business, especially highly paid silk and embroidery work. The girl apprentices, like the boys, ‘lived in’ with their male and female masters and were in some cases treated like members of the family.
Rural women successfully took up the extra work needed in food production. After 1375, there were no regular, frequent national famines, thanks to the reduced population and the increased productivity of women in market gardening, farming, food production processing and distribution.17
Women who took up work in all occupations, at rates of pay that had previously been unobtainable, chose to marry later or even stay single.18 Older wives with smaller families caused a decline in the birth rate and so maintained a smaller population with a shortage of labourers, which in turn kept wages high, encouraging women to prolong their single years.
With few male tenants, landlords leased land and houses to single women – those women living without husbands, renting in their own right and negotiating for themselves. In 1380, Joanna de Boneye, a widow without supportive children, provided for her old age with an agreement with her neighbour John Attestyle of Radcliffe. She gave him the bulk of her land in Bunny and Bradmore, Nottinghamshire, and he housed her for the rest of her life, as attested by a deed between them recorded in Latin on 29 July that year:
John is to give the said Joanna a competent living for herself from the next Feast of St Michael into the future for the whole of her life, and sufficient land for annual sowing of one fernedel of flax seed from John’s own lands, and also annually the sustenance for one cow with her own calf, and one room in John’s own house below the fire and also she may take one key to the hostium celavi [probably larder] of the said John, with liberty to enter and exit for her victuals or necessities in the absence of the wife of the said John.19
Elite families – the nobility or upper gentry – also depended on women survivors. In some families a widow ran the estate and headed the family until the infant son could grow up and take his inheritance. Male guardians and male executors left wills giving women fortunes and authority. Some families were left with only female heirs. Entire dynasties and fortunes depended on the competence of the female head of the family.
Employers and landowners struggled to stop the changes. In Sussex, a relatively poor area of England in 1349, a ring of landowners held down wages and casual labourers and the poor faced hardship.20 Women were pressured to marry and have families to restore the population. Those choosing to live as single women fell under suspicion of the authorities, and the church taught that women should not take on the work of God by deciding who was born and when: contraception became a serious sin. Women who confessed to causing their own miscarriage were given heavier punishments by their confessors, and birth control methods in the published medical texts were hidden in Latin – the language exclusive to the upper classes.21 Midwives were discouraged from teaching birth control methods to their clients.22
The trauma of the plague years changed household charity. No longer were large numbers of the poor fed at the kitchen door, or even at regular feasts at the lord’s table. Lordly giving ceased to be a tradition of the upper classes, with lords no longer demonstrating their wealth and their ‘good lordship’ by generosity to their own people. Laws preventing workers from leaving their parishes meant that travellers were not welcomed. Gifts of food and goods were more controlled, scaled down and directed to employees, not to the local poor, nor vagrants and beggars.23
The plague brought a new twist to misogyny. Some diseases were already blamed on women – it was thought leprosy in a man was caused by having sex with a menstruating women and that sexual diseases were generated by women in their bodies. Now people theorised that women had caused the Great Pestilence. The Westminster Chronicle declared that women had caused the plague because
women flowed with the tides of fashion in this and other things even more eagerly, wearing clothes that were so tight that they wore a fox tail hanging down inside their skirts at the back, to hide their arses. The sin of pride manifested in this way must surely bring down misfortune in the future.24
New laws emphasised the status of husbands by naming the crime of ‘husband-killing’ as the gravest of murders. Only killing a king was worse. The Treason Act of 1351 ruled that a woman who killed her husband committed a crime as serious as that of a priest killing his bishop or a servant killing his master. Establishing the horror of husband-killing and legally defining the subservience of wives, this law reserved a special punishment for murderous wives until 1828 – for nearly 500 years.
A new tax was introduced, specifically aimed at married women. Previous ‘poll’ taxes had counted man and wife as one economic unit – they paid one tax. But the new levy offered no deduction for a wife. Now a married woman had to pay as much as a man or a single woman. While in law she remained under her husband as a femme couvert, tax was now to be levied on her as if she were single. The nationwide resistance created a series of rebellions that would become known as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, or even Wat Tyler’s Rebellion: almost all of the histories ignore the fact that the tax that triggered the uprising was a tax on wives – and it was led by women.
The Peasants’ Revolt
The first acts of insurrection were staged by two Kent women: Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn, in the spring of 1381. They were arrested and imprisoned. On 7 June that year in Larkfield, Kent, Margaret Stafford was accused of ‘helping people to rise up’. A day later, Wat Tyler staged an attack on Canterbury Castle to free Joan Hampcok and Agnes Jekyn, finding them in hand and leg cuffs, treated as the most dangerous prisoners. The rebels broke open the jail and the three leaders, Hampcok, Jekyn and Tyler, led the march of the Kent rebels to London. The next day Maidstone jail was raided and torn to the ground by rebels led by another woman: Julia Pouchere.25
When the rebels invaded London on 13 June, another woman, Johanna Ferrour, led the revolutionaries to the Savoy Palace, stealing a chest of gold from the hated advisor to the king, his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. Ferrour and her supporters burned the Savoy Palace to the ground and loaded a boat with stolen gold, sending it across the river to Southwark, where she divided the profit between herself and other rebels.
Two other women were named as leaders in official documents:
Londoners Matilda Brembole, and her daughter Isabella, were at the firing of the Savoy Palace, they tore to pieces cloth of gold and silver and rich tapestries, broke up the rich furniture, crushed the Duke’s plate, and ground his jewels and precious stones under foot. All that could not be destroyed was thrown into the river. When the work of destruction was over, the Savoy lay a smouldering ruin.26
After the looting of the palace, Matilda and Isabella Brembole led the rioters to the fabulously wealthy Priory of Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem and sacked and fired that too. Another woman, Katherine Gamen, intercepted the rescue boat that had been sent by the authorities to save Chief Justice Cavendish from the mob, setting it adrift. It floated downriver as he dashed towards it, leaving him to be caught by the pursuing mob and beheaded.27
The day after the burning of the Savoy Palace, King Richard II met Wat Tyler to agree a ceasefire. While the peace talks were being held, Johanna Ferrour, who had led the attack, marched at the head of rebels to London’s citadel and pulled the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord High Treasurer out of their refuge: ‘She went as the chief leader to the Tower of London and she laid violent hands on Simon, recently Archbishop of Canterbury, and then on Brother Robert Hales . . . and she dragged them out of the Tower and ordered that they be beheaded.’28
