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The Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and their World 1270-1370

The Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and their World 1270-1370

By Peter Coss
Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-956000-4

In The Foundations of Gentry Life, Peter Coss examines the formative years of the English gentry. In doing so, he explains their lasting characteristics during a long history as a social elite, including adaptability to change and openness to upward mobility from below, chiefly from the professions.

Revolving around the rich archive left by the Multons of Frampton in South Lincolnshire, the book explores the material culture of the gentry, their concern with fashion and their obsession with display. It pays close attention to the visitors to their homes, and to the social relationships between men and women. Coss shows that the gentry household was a literate community, within a literate local world, and he studies closely the consumption of literature, paying particular attention to household entertainment.

Beyond their households, then gentry could assert their pre-eminence in the local community through involvement with the Church and the management of their estates. Treating the relationship between gentry and Church in both devotional and institutional terms, Coss shows how religious practice was a means for the gentry to assert social dominance, and they increasingly treated the Church as a career path for their kin. Protecting their estates was of similar importance, and legal expertise was highly prized-it consequently provided a major means of entry into the gentry, as well as offering further opportunities for younger sons.

Overall, Coss reveals that the cultural horizons of the gentry were essentially local. Nevertheless there were wider dimensions, and the book concludes with observations on how national and chivalric concerns interacted with the rhythms of regional life.

Contents

1: Introduction
2: The Multons and Frampton
3: Gentry Household: The Locus of Consumption
4: Household, Locality and Social Interaction
5: The Gentry Estate: The Locus of Production
6: Commercialisation and Estate Management
7: Human Resources: The Lord and his Tenants
8: The Church as Cultural Space
9: The Gentry and the Parish
10: The Culture of the Cartulary: The Gentry Family and the Protection of Estates
11: Lawyers and Literacy
12: Literature and Household Entertainment
13: The Urban Dimension: The Gentry, Towns and Merchants
14: Conclusion: Cultural Horizons

Readership: Students and scholars of medieval history; those interested in the history of the nobility.

13 Mar 2010
Tags: 2010 Books, England, Social History
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Pulling the Witness by the Ear: A Riddle from the Medieval Ragusan Sources

Pulling the Witness by the Ear: A Riddle from the Medieval Ragusan Sources

By Nella Lonza

Dubrovnik Annals, No.13 (2009)

Abstract: Analysing the Ragusan medieval practice of designating a potential witness by pulling his ear, the author traces the same custom in the legal codes from South East Adriatic (from the islands of Mljet and Lastovo to Shkodër). Finding striking similarities with the antestatio rite in the Twelve Tables code of Roman law, and in a number of testimonies from the Roman literature, the author follows the emergence of a ritual of similar features in the early Germanic law collections (5th-8th c.), in the documents of the Austro- Bavarian region (8th-12th c.), and in the Old Slavic legal terminology. According to the author, the link between the existence of a virtually identical legal ritual in different areas and periods might be accounted by the Roman law tradition, yet basically nourished by the shared understanding of the ear as the seat of memory.

Introduction: A historian immersed in the documentary sources is aware that they record merely a portion of reality. Medievalists are particularly haunted by the question of whether the records mirror what was typical, or, contrarily, the very fact that something was not typical or commonplace guided the recorders to write it down. The realms of oral culture, non-institutional legal behaviour and ritual forms tend to remain beyond the vantage point of historiography. A historian should, of course, write only about the topics that are solidly grounded. This, however, does not exempt him from trying to tackle and interpret the phenomena that are but marginally discernible in the extant sources.

Similarly, a researcher into the medieval Ragusan sources will, through fleeting glimpses, learn about the ritualised behaviour and practice which evidently had complex and far-reaching legal effects without being officially drawn, and more curiously, in a community marked by an advanced written legal tradition, statutory collections and notarial office.

For instance, thirteenth-century Ragusan notary records mention the ritual of ‘falling flat on the ground’ (iactare/ deiactare/proicere se in terram, iactatio in terram, data in terram) through which a debtor symbolically declared his insolvency, which signalled the beginning of a special seizure procedure, regulated by the 1272 Statute. In a case of dispute between the co-owners of a ship in the Dubrovnik port in 1461, as a sign of confirmation of his oath, one of the owners took some seawater with his hand and drank it (et in fidem sacramenti accepit aquam marinam manu et eam bibit).

Based on the analysis of the criminal cases, additionally supported by the evidence in other sources, one may assume the significant role of the settlement ritual that was sealed with a kiss, exchange of gifts or fraternisation which took place out of court and virtually managed to submerge the judiciary. A host of examples may be provided to illustrate this practice.

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13 Mar 2010
Tags: Croatia, Law, Social History
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Coercive Sex in the Medieval Japanese Court: Lady Nijô’s Memoir

Coercive Sex in the Medieval Japanese Court: Lady Nijô’s Memoir

By Hitomi Tonomura

Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 61:3 (2006)

Introduction: In 1271, the retired emperor Go-Fukakusa-in (1243-1304; r.1246– 1259) entered the room of Nijô (1258–after 1307), a female companion protégée who was then fourteen years old, and forced himself upon her. “He handled me so mercilessly that my thin gown was being badly torn, and soon I would be left with nothing in this world, not even my name, as dawn came upon my feelings of bitter despair,” wrote Nijô in her memoir, Towazugatari (Telling Without Being Asked), completed thirty-five years later. By thus exposing the circumstances of what were possibly her first sexual relations, Nijô left a record of coercive sex written from the “recipient’s” perspective, something rare among premodern Japanese literary works.

More than seven hundred years later, Nijô’s description of the apparently violent act often prompts modern readers to debate if it should be called rape. Margaret H. Childs, who carefully assesses the aggressive behavior of earlier classical romantic heroes, such as Hikaru Genji in The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), against the context of a social dynamic that placed a high value on women’s vulnerability and passivity, regards the incident involving Nijô as rape. Nishizawa Masashi also calls the act rape and exercises his own voyeurism in describing it: “The scene in which Nijô is forcibly stripped entirely naked and violated as in a rape (reipu/gôkan) [is] a daring expression imbued with a typically medieval exhibitionism,” which, he holds, contrasts with the more tasteful writings of earlier times.

By focusing on this passage in Nijô’s memoir, which admittedly raises the lexical issue of the definition of “rape,” this article explores how a modern reader might attempt to do justice to Nijô’s authorship and subjectivity as situated in a particular set of social and political circumstances and beholden to certain literary conventions. The sexual incident, whether or not we call it rape, reveals the gender- and status-based relations of power that shaped Nijô’s world and defined the cultural parameters she came both to endorse and resist. Her story serves as a portal through which to understand the life choices of a medieval court woman as she navigated through masculinist prerogatives deeply embedded in the structure of imperial and bureaucratic authority.

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3 Mar 2010
Tags: Japan, Social History, Women’s Studies
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From Dubrovnik (Ragusa) to Florence: Observations on the Recruiting of Domestic Servants in the Fifteenth Century

From Dubrovnik (Ragusa) to Florence: Observations on the Recruiting of Domestic Servants in the Fifteenth Century

By Paola Pinelli

Dubrovnik Annals, Vol. 12 (2008)

Abstract: As confirmed by fifteenth-century documentation, Giuliano Marcovaldi, a merchant from Prato established in Ragusa, along with some Florentine merchants, were involved in the trade of slaves, a special segment of the commerce relations between the Italian peninsula, Ragusa and the Balkan hinterland. The persons sold were mostly young women, many of Patarine or Orthodox faith, who were to become domestic servants. They were exported from the Balkans by Ragusan merchants, and sold to Italian traders in exchange for woollen cloth and food stuffs, especially wheat.

Introduction: In the course of his 1970s studies of medieval slave trade from the Balkans within economic relations between the two Adriatic coasts, Charles Verlinden pointed to the lack of systematic studies on this subject by the Slavs. A few years later, historians tended to shift the focus of their attention to this theme, especially Bariπa Krekic, who published some articles on Ragusa as an intermediary market for this type of trade.

In 1988 Sergio Anselmi promoted a book which contained essays on the migration of Slavs and Albanians to the West from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century and, in 1989, the same subject was dealt within a volume with several articles published in Belgrade. These studies are based on the documents found in the archives of Dubrovnik, Venice and other cities on the east coast of Italy.

Actually, as I have attempted to demonstrate earlier, the cities of Tuscany were also involved in the trade which, through Ragusa, connected the Slavic hinterland with the Italian peninsula. Copious fifteenth-century documentation of Giuliano Marcovaldi, a merchant from Prato established in Ragusa, confirms this and, among other things, contains much information which questions the assumption that in Tuscany there are only a few minor traces of the recruiting of domestic servants in the Balkans.

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23 Feb 2010
Tags: Croatia, Fifteenth Century, Italy, Social History, Urban Studies
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The Muslims of Sicily under Christian Rule

The Muslims of Sicily under Christian Rule

By Alex Metcalfe

The Society of Norman Italy, edited by Graham Loud and Alex Metcalfe (Brill, 2002)

Introduction: The Norman invasion of Sicily was neither an invasion, nor was the kingdom that eventually resulted from it particularly ‘Norman’ in character. At the height of its power in the mid-twelfth century, the kingdom of Sicily included most of the southern Italian peninsula as well as Malta, and colonies along the North African coast. However, it was the island of Sicily that was undoubtedly the gravitational centre of the kingdom’s cultural and political life, and its capital of Palermo was probably Europe’s wealthiest and most populous city. The island was also home to most of the kingdom’s large, Arabic-speaking Muslim communities. Indeed, these formed the majority of the island’s population for most of the kingdom’s short, but spectacular, existence.

In 1061, almost seventy years before the kingdom was proclaimed, a modest military force under the leadership of Robert Guiscard and Roger of Hauteville, but in the pay of a Sicilian amīr, Ibn al-Thumna, arrived to assist in a civil war which had already lasted a generation, and had seen the political and administrative disintegration of the island into petty principalities. The advent of these two leaders and those who were to follow them would introduce fundamental and irreversible changes to the demographic, religious and linguistic base of the island over the next 250 years.

In the Islamic period, the view that the Muslims who hailed mainly from Ifrīqiya (roughly the area covered by modern Tunisia) had repopulated the island is matched by an assimilation theory that ‘most of its population became Muslim’. In the ninth and tenth centuries, many towns of strategic importance were indeed repopulated after their capture, and appear to have assumed an Arab-Islamic character around the entire island. However, change in rural areas seems to have been of a much slower, assimilative type. Even in these more conservative and less carefully monitored environments, most Christian enclaves of Greek or Italo-Greek speakers that had remained are likely to have converted to Islam and/or adopted Arabic as a second language within the space of a few generations. This was probably the scenario in the south-western Val di Mazara, where Arab-Islamic influence had first been established and for most of the Val di Noto in the south-east too. However, it is fair to assume that across and around the many, ragged religious and socio-linguistic frontiers that this created, different communities experienced different degrees of acculturation at varying rates.

For example, in 973, Ibn Ḥawqal, a hostile visitor to Sicily, described how large numbers in rural areas were imperfectly embracing Arab-Islamic norms. In such, communities, he claimed, ‘marriage to Christians is [allowed] provided that their male child follows the father by being a bastardised Muslim (mushaʿmidh), and that a female becomes a Christian like her mother’. He also added that they spoke unintelligibly, like ‘deaf mutes’. Although the idea that there may have existed degrees of Christianity in Sicily makes for an intriguing, if not entirely unattractive, thesis, it also seems from Ibn Ḥawqal’s description of Palermo that it had barely a remaining trace of Christian culture.

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16 Feb 2010
Tags: Islam, Italy, Social History
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Competing Models of Marriage in Quattrocento Florence

Competing Models of Marriage in Quattrocento Florence

By Genevieve Landis

Istoria: An Online Graduate History Journal, Vol.1:1 (2008)

Introduction: On August 24, 1447, Alessandra Strozzi wrote to her son about his sister’s new husband, Marco Parenti. “He is a young man of good birth and abilities and an only son, rich and twenty-five years of age, and he has a silk manufacturing business.” Although the union was a step down for a Strozzi woman, Alessandra stressed Marco’s wealth and social status as an only son, and also mentioned that the Parenti “take a small part in the government.” She quickly moved on to discuss the dowry, “because he who marries is looking for cash.” Alessandra’s outlook toward her daughter’s marriage focused on status and money, very different concerns from those promoted by the Catholic Church’s view of marriage.

In the early fifteenth-century, two models of marriage dominated Florence. The first was religious, consolidated by the Catholic Church in the twelfth-century and widely recognized throughout Europe by the fifteenth. This formulation stressed marriage as a sacrament, and relied on both male and female consent to determine validity. The second model, the socioeconomic, was especially influential among Florentine elites. Unlike the religious view, the socioeconomic model saw marriage as necessary for building alliances between families and highlighted the social and economic benefits of the union, including social status and the dowry.

The civic humanists of the early fifteenth-century proposed a third model, which sought both to correct perceived problems in the earlier models and to fashion a definition of marriage that would strengthen the patriarchy. Critically, the humanist model sought to strengthen the republican government by stressing female dependence on males and further removing women from the public sphere. In doing so humanists aimed to reinforce their republican government, which depended on the bonds between men. Whereas in a monarchy women had a more clearly defined role as the mothers of princes, female power was often limited to the royal family. In a republic, each wife could claim authority as mother to the next generation of citizens, potentially creating a large class of powerful women. It was in republics, then, that civic humanists were most concerned to define women’s roles as completely separate from the public sphere. In order to examine the new model promoted by early fifteenth-century humanists, this article will first describe the religious and socioeconomic views of marriage before discussing the humanist model. The final section will then demonstrate both how the humanist model differed and why the humanists believed Florentines needed a new model for marriage.

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13 Feb 2010
Tags: Fifteenth Century, Italy, Social History, Urban Studies
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Banditry and the Subversion of State Authority in China: The Capital Region during the Middle Ming Period (1450-1525)

Banditry and the Subversion of State Authority in China: The Capital Region during the Middle Ming Period (1450-1525)

By David M. Robinson

Journal of Social History, Vol. 33, No. 3, (2000)

Introduction: By 1500 or so, the principal dynastic capital of the Ming, Beijing, had a population of between 800,000 and one million and oversaw a China that had largely overcome the political, economic, and social dislocations attendant upon both the destructive battles of the dynastic founding of the mid and late fourteenth century and the civil war of 1399-1403. Indeed, stretching some 1,200 miles from the Great Wall in the north to semi-tropical ricelands of the south and over 1,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the rugged wind-swept province of Shaanxi to the west, in 1500, the Ming empire was one of the greatest in the world at the time. It was the most populous country by far, with an estimated population of over 155 million at the turn of the sixteenth century (compared with approximately 60 million for all of Europe). Just as China’s increasingly vibrant economy was poised for a century-long period of expansion, the culturalr ealm too was emerging from a fifteenth century “slump” to embark upon a brilliant florescence in printing, literature, painting, and thought.

Ming government was among the largest and most sophisticated in the world. From his palace in Beijing, the emperor oversaw a bureaucracy of over 20,000 men and a subbureaucracy several hundred times that size. They staffed the central government and the 1,200 or so prefectural, subprefectural and county seats spread across the empire. Although it may have been devilishly complex and often times inefficient, many European observers of the late sixteenth century described the Chinese bureaucracy with considerable admiration. The Augustianian monk Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza wrote in his very influential 1585 work on China, “this mightie kingdome is one of the best ruled and gouerned of any that is at this time knowen in all the world … ”

For all the apparent power and glory of the Ming, there were, however, serious breaches in domestic security, even in the heart of the empire – the Capital Region. The experience of one lowly clerk is suggestive. By mid-summer 1468, the clerk, Shi Huizong, had just begun the last leg of a nearly thousand-mile journey from his hometown, Fuqing County, in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian to the capital in Beijing. Shi, like hundreds of other clerks and assorted minor functionaries throughout the Ming empire, was making an annual delivery of tax silver and other tribute items. However, misfortune struck when he reached Huoxian, a prosperous entrepot along the Grand Canal less than 25 miles south of the capital. There, armed bandits seized the silver, his luggage, silks, and travel money. Shi’s fate was not an isolated incident. Many officials from the southern provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi also complained that their residents were similarly robbed in the Capital Region while attempting to deliver taxes and tribute to Beijing. The officials took pains to point out that imperial troops from garrisons around the capital were often among the bandits who preyed upon their clerks.

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5 Feb 2010
Tags: Administration, China, Social History
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