Social History in Perspective: Family and Household

¶ … Social History in Perspective: Family and Household in Medieval England, by Peter Fleming. Specifically, it will examine several questions regarding the book and its author. Peter Fleming's book deals mainly with the laws surrounding medieval families, and how they affected so many parts of family life. Less attention to the law, and more attention to the actual activities of the family might have made it a more interesting read.

FAMILY AND HOUSEHOLD IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Peter Fleming's book "Family and Household in Medieval England" is a historical text on the social history of medieval England, as the title suggests. The author concerns himself mostly with the history of family life and how it developed legally and socially. He follows the typical family through a natural order of events, from marriage, to childbirth through the end of the family unit due to death or disillusion of the unit by divorce, but always with the element of how laws affect this typical family. Fleming concentrates on the English family unit because he feels each country has "their own peculiarities" (Fleming, 2001, p. 3), and there is a wealth of information and research material available for England. Fleming uses broad definitions of 'family' and 'household' for his book. He says a family or a household is: "those members of the same kin who live together under one roof" and "persons living together under the same roof" (Fleming, 2001, p. 2).

Fleming seems to have written this book because he felt that our modern families owe a lot to how families grew and developed during medieval times, especially since many of our modern family laws had their roots in the common laws created in England's Magna Carta, which was written in 1215 (Fleming, 2001, p. 4). This is the thesis the author follows throughout the book, and therefore, much of the time the book reads somewhat like a law tome, making it a bit tedious and hard to follow at times, especially if the reader is not extremely familiar with medieval law.

The book follows English medieval family history from about the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, through early Tudor times in the1520s. These were important times for the family in England, for the country was changing, rulers were changing, and of course, the family unit had to change to keep up. What is interesting about Fleming's particular methodology is how he relates the family not only to the personal issues of the family unit, but also how the family relates to the laws, economics, society, culture, religion, and technology of the times.

If the researcher is looking for distinctive family habits and household types of living, this book may be a disappointment, for it really delves into the context of the family and its outside forces, rather than simply the family itself. For example, the first section of the book, entitled "Marriage Making," deals with marriage, but it does not focus on the actual ceremony or details. Rather, it views marriage from the legal viewpoint of the period, and delves into why people chose to get married in medieval times, and what early cultures and laws helped contribute to medieval ideas of marriage and consent. (They were Roman, Jewish-Christian, and German.)

The "Family Life" section of the book may come closest to portraying day-to-day life in a medieval household, but its main focus is still the societal and outside forces on the members of the family. He does discuss the importance of affection and sexual relations in a marriage, and even what happens to a widow or widower. It is clear Fleming's main interest and concern throughout the book is how laws and society affected the family, rather than how individual members reacted to those laws and societal pressures.

The final section, titled "The Dissolution of Marriage and its Consequences," is perhaps one of the most disappointing in the book, because it leaves so many unanswered questions. It deals mainly with widows rather than widowers, with more heavy emphasis on how the law deals with the property left behind in broken marriages.

A gained many insights and information on the medieval family's relationship to law and church doctrine by reading this book, but it was not what I expected when I picked it up. I expected to be reading more of how people lived in a family, with specific details that would aid someone perhaps researching medieval times for a novel or report on the actual day-to-day lives of families. Instead, the book dealt with law and society, and while it was at times interesting, it was not what I expected, and so was a let down in other areas. I grew tired of reading about the laws and their relationship to family activities. I wanted to know more about the people themselves.