Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘Fairs required considerable trust and the recurrent nature of inter-connected fairs allowed for flexible credit arrangements. For example, two merchants from southern Italy buying four pieces of cloth from a Brescian merchant promised to pay their debt on demand the following August in any one of sixteen fairs located between Lanciano in the south and Recanati and Venice in the north.‘

‘It is apparent, then, that fixed-shop retailing appeared at a much earlier stage than has been acknowledged before. On the other hand, alternative retailing circuits and practices continued to be of great important even in later periods. Judging by the quantitative importance of shopkeepers on the labour market, it seems safe to label the eighteenth century as the ‘golden age’ of the shopkeeper.‘

‘the demise of a partner was often the most emotionally distressing event an individual would suffer. Despite high mortality, most first marriages tended to last over twenty years, intensifying the wrench between partners when it occurred. In surveys of households between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, around a fifth were headed by only one partner’

‘The obvious answer to the question of why people in early modern England had children is that, lacking contraception, they had little or no choice. This is not entirely true, as there were some options available, including abstention, coitus interruptus, and breast-feeding. Of these breast-feeding, or lactation, was the most significant, as it inhibits conception (although not with absolute certainty)’

‘children could leave home for a period of service when seven or eight, but most did not leave until they were in their mid-teens and most apprentices were in the age range of 15 to 25. It was from this point that they began to acquire some of the legal status that marked them off from children. Most significantly, females reached the legal age of puberty at 12 and males at 14.’

‘Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these methods illuminate an interesting picture of early modern society. They demonstrate that, contrary to many assumptions, in this period marriage was not early, but relatively late, at a mean of around 25 or 26 years for women and 26 to 28 years for men (which compares with ages of 22 and 24, respectively, in the 1970s).’

‘For Philippe Ariès, focusing on children, the period of transformation was the sixteenth century, when, he argued, artists began to reflect a new concept of childhood as a distinct state, instead of showing children as merely small adults. From this, he concluded that childhood, as a concept, was a relatively recent invention. DeMause’s work intensified this picture, arguing for a continual evolution’

‘the way they were constantly probing the limits of what was permitted to them as single women. If single women in manufacturing were sometimes treated severely this did not prevent them persisting in setting up as businesswomen. A surprising number succeeded. If in theory it was difficult, with guilds and borough custom set against them, despite such obstacles many did succeed.’

‘In such an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, witchcraft fits easily. It was ‘part of the arsenal of formal and informal sanctions local communities employed to enforce orderly, conventional behaviour’. Christina Larner described witch hunting as ‘women hunting or at least it is the hunting of women who do not fulfil the male views of how women ought to conduct themselves’.’

‘Paul Slack draws attention to two particularly vulnerable groups: children and single women. The same was true of other towns of the period. In Salisbury, for example, single women figured in the list twice as often as married women. In general, it was the very young and the very old who were found in the poor lists. Out of 2,359 individuals included in the Norwich list, 362 or 15% were spinsters.’

‘A daughter’s leaving home was influenced by whether the family could afford to keep her or whether the parents depended on her earnings for their subsistence - as often happened where the daughter was employed in cottage industry such as lace. Girls might well have preferred not to leave home if it meant finding accommodation: it was far cheaper to stay in the parental home.‘

‘Common law established the rights of feme sole, that is both spinsters and widows, to trade on their own account but borough custom might intervene to restrict that right. In Oxford, for example, the council tightly controlled who was admitted into the trading community and made freemen of the town. Wives could trade but they could not become freemen and were made to pay quarterage‘

‘Of Seend near Melksham in Wiltshire, in confirmation of these figures, Eden reported that ‘a woman in a good state of health, and not encumbered with a family can only earn 2s. 6d’. Unless they lived with their families such earnings were totally inadequate for such women to pay for accommodation.’

‘Thus most unmarried girls and women in rural areas in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were either working and living in other people’s houses and on other people’s farms or were absorbed into the labour needs of farms large or small. There must nevertheless have been unmarried women who were not servants and had no home farm to use for their labour.‘

‘proclaim crusades was established by two of them: Urban II, who set the precedent when he preached the First Crusade in 1095; and Eugenius III, who issued for the Second Crusade Quantum predecessores, the first true crusade encyclical. Whatever the contribution of Pope Gregory VII to crusading ideas... the initiative following the appeal of the Byzantine embassy to the Council of Piacenza was Urban’s own.’

‘Besides the various vernacular words that appeared in the thirteenth century, like croiserie in French and English, it could be called a pilgrimage (iter or peregrinatio), a holy war (bellum sacrum ore guerre sainte), a passage or general passage (passagium generale), an expedition of the Cross (expeditio crucis) or the business of Jesus Christ (negotium Jhesu Christi)’

‘Richard Smith had recently argued that poor relief provision was preferentially given to elderly women in the late seventeenth century. Early modern English widows were often paid twice as much as married couples, and those who had been better-off before the death of their husbands were given higher levels of relief.’

‘On the day a Tudor or Stuart woman lost her husband, she shed the restrictive bonds imposed by coverture and regained her independent legal status. Now she could own property, enter into contracts, make a will, buy and sell goods, collect rents, accept gifts and bring legal actions.’

‘The topic of widowhood can be found across the genres of printed satires, dialogues, paradoxes, discourses and even private letters and mémoires. Most of the satires and prescriptive literature tend to come from male pens and depict moral conventions, stereotypes and caricatures. The lusty widow was a favourite target. She personified the concern expressed in the Edict of Second Marriages’

‘Another complaint which cut at the heart of the reforms of Innocent III was of the system of vow redemptions; the easy availability, which amounted to the direct sale of indulgences; and the use to which the money was put. Very large sums were raised in this way until the system broke down in the mid-fourteenth century. An unsophisticated law of demand and supply operated.’

‘Crusade preaching exposes something of the nature of crusading as devised in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in its development beyond the specific task of recruiting to raise money and form a tool of general pastoral efforts by the church hierarchy. Because of this integration its apparatus could survive when private commitment to fighting for the Cross was overtaken‘

‘The crusader’s temporal privileges had grown up over the twelfth century, reaching full elaboration in the decrees of the kings of England and France at the time of the Third Crusade and the subsequent legislation of Innocent III. They addressed the intimate material concerns of the crucesignatus: protection for him, his family and property; accelerated litigation before departure; essoin of court’

‘in the century following the first publication of Vives’ work English widows did continue to engage vigorously in economic affairs, and indeed became even more numerous amongst those involved in litigation. They were also increasingly less likely to remarry. They played the man’s part. If they were going to be controlled it would have to be by self-restraint, balancing feminine virtue with public virility.’

‘What was ‘widowhood’ in medieval Europe? A perhaps rather startling fact was that a woman’s husband did not have to die for her to be designated a widow. He might instead enter the church. After all, retreat to the monastic vocation meant in effect that a man was ‘dead to the world’... A second route to widowhood was if the husband was away for longer than a prescribed period (often three years).’

‘Despite Innocent III’s codification of crusade organisation, one supreme peculiarity survived the twelfth century to persist until modern times: the lack of a precise, specific and universally accepted name to describe the activity. Even after the term crucesignatus became fashionable in Latin texts after the Third Crusade, the expeditions themselves were still represented either by non-specific words’

‘Thus, although provided with an administrative pattern by the end of Innocent III’s pontificate (1216), crusading lacked consistent focus. For all its prominence in religious rhetoric, clerical commentary and secular interest, the ideas, descriptions and behaviour linked to this form of Holy War remained noticeably imprecise and malleable, lacking definition in law or language.’

‘In law and action, its operation remained confused with other habits and forms. As an awareness of a continuing tradition - as opposed to a glittering memory of the First Crusade - it grew haphazardly. For official clarity, attempted definition and some uniformity, one must look at Innocent III and beyond. The twelfth century is crusading’s Dark Ages.’