Gone Medieval - How to Survive as a Medieval Woman

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

What was life really like for working peasant women in the Middle Ages? How did family, marriage, work and social class shape their choices, joys and struggles?Taking a break from the usual queens, noblewomen and saints of the Medieval period, Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Catherine Hanley to explore the unsung experiences of mothers and daughters, wives, widows and women workers across medieval society.MOREThe Anarchy: Disruptive WomenListen on AppleListen on SpotifyHow to Survive the 14th CenturyListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Jangea. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Watch Eleanor and Matt's new documentary The Rise of the Plantagenets with a History Hit subscription. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early-access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. If you're someone who's interested in daily life in the medieval period, it can sometimes be a bit frustrating that the majority of society doesn't get spoken about much. Here I don't necessarily mean the 99.9% of people who weren't royalty and nobility. I don't even mean the 70-some percent of people who were pedophobic. I mean the 52% of the population who are women. Having said that, the reasons we don't hear much from women have a lot to do with the same reasons we don't hear much from those other majorities.

The way that source survival works privileges the people who have the time and the money to write things down. And those are the people who have the money and the time to store those records for at least half a millennium. Then on top of that, you have to be literate in the first place to write it all down, and look, you get the point. Added to these more universal problems, those historians interested in women have to contend with an issue that we call covature. This is a technical term, and it talks about the fact that from a legal standpoint, women in the medieval period aren't really presented as individuals, but as a part of a family union. unit. So say for example you are a woman in 14th century Derbyshire. You're not going to necessarily show up in the records as Beatrice Sherritt. You're going to show up either as Mrs. Joseph Sherritt or maybe Joseph Sherritt's daughter if you never married. So if you

really want to find out what medieval women were up to, you need to go looking not for individuals, but start digging into records which look at families. And that is exactly what Dr. Catherine Hanley has done in her new book, The Family Lives of Medieval Women. Today, she's here with me to talk about women's experiences in the Middle Ages and how we uncover them. Catherine, welcome to Gone Medieval. Hello, not lovely to be here. I'm really excited to have you here because I absolutely devoured this book. Absolutely loved it. And, I think it's an incredibly important one because there is a tendency when we talk about women in the middle ages, obviously, to look at the big famous ones. You know, you talk about Joan of Arc, you talk about Eleanor Vakrotin, these are all fine things.

But as you quite rightly point out, about 99.99% of women in the medieval period are existing much more in, if not a domestic context, certainly a familial context. So can you talk a little bit about what the meaning of being a woman is regarding family life? Yeah, so this idea for this book came to me while I was writing a previous book, which is called Lioness Hart, which is about Joanna, who was the youngest daughter of Henry II and Eleanor Bacquitaine. And what came home to me while I was writing that is how Joanna was never really seen as, a person in her own right or a person who had the right to dictate the course of her own life. She was merely the representative of her family, of her father, her mother, her brother and so on.

And I thought it would be good to explore that further. And to be honest, when I started, I thought that when I looked at the familial situations of women a bit lower down the social scale, that I was going to find completely the opposite. and that this was going to be women's lives were delineated by class and that royal women and noble women and gentry and townswomen and peasant women would all have very, very different lives. But the evidence was so overwhelming in the other direction that I was forced to change my tune.

And what I found was that although, you know, obviously women did lead very different lives according to class, but one thing that they all had in common was that they were not seen as individuals in their own right with the right to have their own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Wherever you look throughout society, medieval society, or in England, because that's what I was looking at, women were expected to be the Support Act for their family. And I just thought that was so interesting. I just thought, right, I'm going to look at this all the way from Royal,

right down to peasants and just examine how that concept of family affected all of them. I think that this is such an important point. You know, I suppose that I kind of referred to it in my books as the inbuilt expectation of women is that you're going to be a wife, you're going to be a mother. Even before you get there, you're a daughter, right? You are always this extension of a family instead of. an individual. That that status specifically as daughter is a really interesting one, right? Because I don't think that we think about that relationship in the same way any longer. You know, it's not this sort of like, oh, well, you're a bargaining chip or you are an extra pair of hands. You know, there is this real way of relating even from a very early age to children as though, well, girl children, as though they are this specific, offshoot of their family.

Yeah, exactly. And we find, you know, in the records that quite often where these girls are mentioned, they don't even have their own names. So, you know, Joanna might be just referred to in records as the daughter of Henry the second. And we see that all over the place. You know, when Louis VIII, the future Louis VIII of France married Blanche of Castile, she was just referred to in the records as,

the daughter of King Alfonso and because in effect it doesn't really matter what their own names are because what's important about them is their lineage. But interestingly we also see this right at the lowest level of society. Now one of my favourite types of record

is manor court records. So just for anyone out there who's not familiar with them in England most places had a manor where there was a lord of the manor and there were people, villagers who lived on the manor. This was the standard way of living in rural areas. And every three or four weeks throughout the year, the manor would have a court.

Now, this didn't try serious crimes. It's not talking about murder or anything like that. We're talking about you let your pig stray into somebody else's movements, you know, or you want to inherit a piece of land, something like that. And they kept records. Now, a lot of those have disappeared by now, but we have got some extant ones and they're fabulous. It's like opening a door and walking into the medieval village

and just meeting these people. But it's the same, the way women are written about is exactly the same way that they're written about at the higher levels of society. So in these records, men will have a name and then like a place or an occupation. You know, there'll be John the Miller or John of course. Conisbrough or something. But the women around them are defined by their relationship to that man. So instead of a woman having her own name,

she will just be referred to as the wife of John Miller or the daughter of John of Conisbrough. And yeah, it's just fascinating the way, even when they're appearing in the man of court in their own right, they often don't have their own names. And it's because they weren't an individual, they were a part of this household unit, the head of which was a man? I find this just incredibly important. And also, I guess, the concept of the household for women.

I think now when we think of a household, you know, we're thinking of a nuclear family or I suppose within a modern context, maybe even you and your flatmates as things stand. Certainly we also see, for example, if ordinary women, women from the lower echelons of society in England want to move around, We certainly have laws on the book, for example, in Southampton, where if a woman comes to town, she has to join a household within a week or she's asked to leave because women can't just be individuals. There needs. No, women being independent, that's dangerous. It's a danger to society. Quite literally, you know, and so the idea that you might have like these women floating around without a man that you can say, oh, that's the man that's responsible for her.

It is enough of a problem that there are laws about it. You know, so there's just no way to relate to women without, without this household unit, you know. Yeah, single women or women exerting their own independence were genuinely considered to be a threat to the fabric of society. They had to be in their place. What's really interesting is that medieval women were routinely expected to be active and often. authoritative and to know what they were doing, but they were only supposed to do that as part of this household or family unit. It's fine to defend the castle while your husband is away, but as soon as he comes back, you have to step back. It's fine to mine the shop for your husband,

or even to take it over if he dies, but you shouldn't set up a shop on your own. You know, it's, everything has to be in support of the familial structure. Now, one of the ways that you've already mentioned you look at varying lives of women in this is via class. So I thought today we might just start right at the bottom, you know, with my favorites, the peasants, you know, that most of women are peasants, right? And so I think it is very valuable to understand what is going on for women peasants because, you know, there's, a lot of work. There's a lot of drudgery, but I think also we are living through a particularly odd time where people romanticize the life of medieval peasants. I don't know if you've seen these memes where people say, oh, medieval peasants actually had more time off than you do,

which is a complete misunderstanding of how work on a farm works. But one of the things you really highlight is that often the way work on the farm is talked about is people will say there's inside work and outside work. And the idea is that women do the inside work and men do the outside work. Could you first just tell us a little bit what differentiates inside from outside work? Yeah. Okay. So inside doesn't necessarily mean inside the house.

It means staying within the sort of household property. So it's house and garden and also dairy. Whereas outside work is what men do when they go away. from the house that they live in to do work. So they're working in the fields. That would be very different at different times a year. You know, sewing, weeding, harvesting, ploughing, that kind of thing. Whereas women's work was inside the household.

So just to give a few random examples, and this won't be everything, cooking, baking, brewing, spinning, weaving, sewing, childcare, care of domestic animals, cows, goats, poultry, sauce, sourcing firewood, sourcing water, gleaning for nuts, berries, plants, running the garden, growing vegetables, growing herbs, making medicines for the household. So all of these count as inside work. And some of them obviously were seasonal. You do different things in your garden at different times of year. But other things like having to cook the family's daily meal and looking after your children, that sort of thing went on all the year round. And it's interesting what people say about holidays because it's all very well saying peasants had 12 days off at Christmas and they were able to feast. Who do you think was cooking these feasts? Who was bringing the firewood in to put on the fire to cook these feasts? You know, a holiday is never really a holiday for the person who works in the kitchen, is it?

Well, exactly. And you know, you can't tell the cows it's Christmas, right? they still need feeding, they still need milking, you know, all of those things continue to happen one way or another, it's more what we would consider the superfluous jobs, you know, whatever that may be. I suppose that the women aren't spinning. Yeah, yeah, that's probably they could take a break from that. But yeah, they've still got to look after their children and cook and, as you say, feed the livestock and so on. And what's really interesting is if you look at medieval illuminated calends,

that have pictures, you know, of the seasons. On a page for January, if a January page shows a man, he will almost inevitably be either eating or putting his feet up next to the fire. But if a January page has a picture of a woman on it, she's almost certainly cooking or baking. Ah, yeah, yeah. I find the eliminations of calendars so useful because one of the other things they show us

and which you make a good point of in the book is, you know, we say, okay, well, the women are doing the inside work, the men are doing outside work, except there are times when women are also doing the outside work, aren't they? We see this especially in June, July, August and calendars, don't we? Yes, yeah, when it's time to mow the hay,

which is generally in June, and to get the main grain harvest in, which is mainly in August. Yeah, every single hand was needed. So women and children just had to drop everything and go and help the menfolk in the fields. But of course, they then had to do their domestic work as well because it's all very well going, well, I'm going to go and, you know, help stack the corn in the field. But somebody's still got to feed the chickens.

The chickens don't care that it's harvest. Yeah. So what's interesting is that women were continually expected to multitire. and also to expect to be interrupted in whatever they were doing to go and help with jobs that were more important. And I'm doing air quotes here, important, only to find that they still had to come home and do the rest, because that seemingly inconsequential domestic work actually turned out to be really important. And I think another incredibly important point you make here is that whereas the outside work could, be done by women. There is always, you know, say, I don't know, your friend John, who usually

helps you plow if you're a man does his ankle and can't do it, you can always tap your wife in and say, sorry, we're plowing today, come with me. But the opposite is not true. So women can be brought in to do outside work, but men are not going to do inside work. No, they absolutely didn't, because this is a sort of hierarchical situation where the men's work is considered to have higher status, higher prestige. So a woman helping the men in her family is absolutely fine. But the idea of a man going home to do cooking or laundry or spinning was so outrageous that even to see it mentioned or depicted, you'd only see that in like a satire of the world turned up.

down. The idea of a picture of a man with a spindle was a sign that the world had been turned upside down. So yeah, women helped men, but men didn't routinely help women with their domestic tasks. So it's interesting to consider, I mean, I didn't really do this a lot in the book, but it would be really interesting to consider the differing workload of men and women in families, depending on how many of their children were sons and how many were daughters. You know, a lot of medieval families would say, oh, we want lots of sons. But, you know, if you were the housewife, you'd probably want multiple daughters to

help you out. If you had a husband and six sons and no daughters, you know, your workload is going to be quite considerable. Oh, yeah, gosh. I hate to even think about it, right? But there is also, of course, you know, within peasant society, there is then a knock-on of fact that you highlight in the book, which is that. You know, there are sorts of jobs that are sort of day jobs, you know, day rate things, you know, things like, for example, fixing roads or doing things for the master of the manner that are sort of on top of your ordinary dues with, for example, the Corv.

And one of the things we certainly see is that women are working alongside men in these jobs, but they are very specifically being remunerated at different levels. Yeah, and this was because women's work was basically always. only seen as helping. They're not the Thatcher in charge. They're the one carrying the straw. And we see actually a lot of women working on building sites, which we might think of as quite unusual. But again, they're doing the very menial tasks.

They're not the masons or the stone cutters. They are the people lugging around buckets of water and sand. And, yeah, they would do this like on a daily basis. It wouldn't be like a full-time employment, as might be the case if you were a masoned or so on. And it just meant because they were only ever considered as the help, they could just be hired or let go at literally a moment's notice. You know, these women might turn up in the morning at a building site, and the guy in charge would just go, well, it's too wet to set more to today.

So we don't need people to carry water and sand. So basically go away and come back tomorrow. with no sort of thought that they might actually need that money because any money that women would be earning would only be as an additional help to their household. The idea was that they would all have a male breadwinner. The clue is in the name and that they were just earning a bit of extra pin money.

And I mean, I suppose we do see, especially in a rural context, actually a lot of younger women working out of the house but within other households. So for example, we see the role of the dairy made being incredibly important or the parlor made. Can you tell us a little bit about what those women are doing and how you kind of end up somewhere else?

Yeah, so to take dairying was specifically considered on all farms and manners to be a female job, whether that was because it was sort of partly indoors or involved cooking or food. It's kind of not quite clear. I think what's probably most common is that it wasn't, you know, feeding the poultry and the cows and doing the milking and making the cheese is a skilled task. But it wasn't physically as arduous as, you know, pulling a plough or chopping down trees. So it was probably felt that to have a man doing those jobs would be a bit of a waste.

And we actually find there's a book of husbandry from the 14th century that I quoted. And it's absolutely brilliant. It just says it's always better to have a woman there because you can pay them less than you would pay a man. to do the same. I'm like, spell it out in black and white. Why don't you? Thank you. Yeah, so women were, yeah, dairy was a female job,

but it was, you know, it was quite skill. Making butter and making cheese. You know, if you get it wrong, you could waste quite a lot of the farms resources. And the dairy maid didn't have the advantage of everything that we have on dairy farms now. You know, they didn't know about enzymes. and bacteria and they didn't have thermometers and things like that. They had to do it all by eye and by experience.

And, you know, to make a good cheese. Oh, yeah. I'm a big fan of cheese. And, you know, to make a good cheese is quite difficult. So it was this skilled job. She had to know exactly, you know, how long to leave the milk, exactly what quantities of today's milk and yesterday's milk to mix in, maybe a bit of cream, maybe not too much cream, you know,

depending on and you could make all these different cheeses. So it was hard work and she was expected to know her business, but also to be always supervised in it by the male bailiff or, you know, of the farm. And she was expected to come up with what they considered to be the right amount of cheese and butter. You know, if she wasn't terribly good at it and she didn't make, get quite enough milk out of the cows or didn't make quite enough cheese, you know, there would always be this idea that maybe she was half-inching some to take home or that she wasn't very good at her job. So, yeah, and this was the sort of work that was done by younger women.

So farm labourers and domestic servants, who I'll come to in a minute, were generally employed on annual contracts. So a young unmarried woman would be able to take on a job like this for a whole year, save the money up, and then put that in her little fund, ready for when she wants to get married and start a household of her own, whereas married women could only take on ad hoc work. So daily paid work at the building site, doing a bit of extra spinning or weaving, sell it,

selling off if she's brewed too much ale, selling it off, that kind of thing. So the sort of work done by married and unmarried women was very different. And similarly, these unmarried women might take an animal. contract to go and be a domestic servant. Again, for similar purposes, to save a bit of money to put towards when she wants her own household. But again, these roles are very confined. She would be under the authority of the head of the household that she was working in.

So she would count as a member of that household and still be subject to it in the way that all the other female members of that household were. So these household positions, I think, are incredibly important because they, They are also, I think, quite familiar to people now, you know, if you say the term scullery made, that conjures up images. And you do have these households, especially wealthier households that are absolutely crawling with unmarried young women who are doing these tasks. But I think they're also really often ignored. And one of the things I really enjoyed in the book is how you talked about what all of these varying jobs were. Can you tell us a little bit about what sort of things we would find women doing in houses?

Yeah. So a lot of it depends on the size of the household in which a young woman was employed. If it was a small, not terribly well-off household, she would find herself being what we might now call a maid of all work, having to do a bit of everything. But in a larger household, there would be specific jobs. So you might be the dairy made, as we've spoken about. You might be the laundry made, which is a job I certainly wouldn't want because that is very hefty. That's the worst possible job. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't. No mod cons at all.

Just get yourself down to the river with that. And actually, laundry was always done by women. Even monasteries that only had men inside them would send their washing out to women to lawn dresses. You know, men did not under any circumstances do their own laundry. Yes, on the Third Crusade, when it was thought that the army wasn't making enough progress because there was sin in the host, the army was told to move on, leaving all of the women behind except for laundresses, which tells you something about how important they were.

It was menial, but it was really important. And that kind of sums up a lot of what was cast as women's work in the middle ages. It's menial, but you can't manage without it. So, yeah, lawn dresses might be employed on the manor or in the household. You might also have indoor staff, what we might now call a parlour maid, you know, doing. So they'd be doing the sweeping and the cleaning, again, which is a very physical job. It's not like you can just get your hoover out or anything. All housework was just really hard physical labour.

and yeah so these young girls would be employed to do these different jobs in the household but they would be kept under very strict supervision as they were doing it you know no mixing with the male household staff or anything like that you know the the wife who was in charge of the household would be very much keeping an eye on them I think it's quite funny when you see these manuals that tell you how to pick your parlour-made or your dairy-maid one of the first things they always say is that she should be a girl of good character. You should know that she is not going to be. Essentially, I think they're saying she's not going to be trying to kiss the boys is what they all say. So there's this huge premium. Yes. She needs to concentrate on her work and not be flirting with the male staff. This is a sort of instruction they had. I mean, I'm by no means an expert on the 19th century. But I'm fairly sure that when they employed, you know, in the Victorian era when they employed parlor maids, didn't they have similar rules like that? Absolutely. It's kind of eyes on the task. Don't acknowledge that there are men around sort of a thing.

Yeah. Female behavior has to be contained and controlled. I think one of the things that you really pointed out well as well is just the incredible physicality of all these jobs. Because when we say getting water, one of the things I kind of always try to stress to people is, I don't think you realize how heavy water is. You know, water is very, very heavy and you're having to move. it back and forth. It's going to slosh all over you. And you need to do this in order to clean the floors in the kitchen. You need to do this in order to cook in the kitchen. You need to do this in order to wash clothing. There's so much moving water around. Oh gosh, into the brewery. If you are working as one of the women in a brewery, which is very common as well. You know,

so much of it is literally just moving water around and it is incredibly unpleasant. it's incredibly physical. I mean, a wooden bucket is actually quite heavy, even when it's empty. And so lugging it from your cottage to the well or the stream or the spring or depending on where you are, filling it up and lugging it back. And actually the area around the well can be quite dangerous because, of course, there's a lot of water slopping around and it can get quite slippery. And it's not unknown for women and girls to actually fall in a well.

and there you've got to lug it all the way back and you can't carry enough water for a household in one bucket in one go you've got to go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards either that or you've got lots of daughters who can help you and yeah I mean one of the things I wanted to get across

specifically in the chapter about peasant women was just how much work went into everything it's all very well saying gosh how awful they had to cook every meal from scratch, but it's not even that. You can't even start cooking it until you've got the firewood and the water and your grains been grown and harvested and threshed and winnowed and ground. And similarly, they had to sew all their own clothes,

but you can't even start doing that until you've woven the cloth and you can't weave the cloth until you've spun the yarn and you can't spin the yarn until you've sheared the sheep. Absolutely everything was just this huge, long, laborious process. And I really admire these women. I tell you, they must have been a lot fitter than me. Just industrious doesn't even begin to cover it

because their entire lives are just dedicated to the practice of keeping the household going, keeping them closed, keeping them fed, keeping everything clean. And it isn't the same in a post-industrial world. It just isn't. They're doing these end. days where things literally, literally never end. And then, you know, probably looking after five children as well. It's ridiculous. Yeah, or doing all this while heavily pregnant.

It's just incredible to think about and it's very difficult for us to imagine today, just how physical that was. It's dawn until dusk and sometimes beyond every single day of the year without a let up, regardless of whether you get up and you don't feel too. too well, or you've got a bit of a cold, or your kids are ill, or, you know, you can't just don't feel like doing that today. Maybe I won't bother. You just can't. There is no other choice. And being a housewife in inverted commerce was genuinely a full-time job. I sometimes think, you know, if I could bring one of these women into my kitchen now, and I'm like, here's the machine that washes the clothes.

This is the machine that washes the dishes. Even this is the machine that makes the bread. Yeah, yeah, you just turn this and the water comes out of a sink. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. You know, they bite your hand off. All this stuff about all they led idyllic lives. You know, sometimes with our modern, you know, overly scheduled lives that are very busy with our technology and our diaries and everything, you might think,

oh, it might be quite nice to be a medieval person. present. Really, try it. Try it for two days and then come back and tell me. No. I love them. I admire them. I think they're some of the most interesting people who ever lived and there is not a chance that I would ever trade places with any of them. They did. You can see that sometimes when you look at records, you know, they did have managed. Somehow they managed to have a bit of fun as well, May Day celebrations or parties. And some of them, you know, when I look in the manor records, sometimes we're lucky and we get quite a big fragment of a manor record that lasts for several years coming. You can see the same names coming up over and over again. And you think,

there's a woman who didn't take any nonsense. It's funny because you develop these relationships with people through the sources. You know, when you see them coming up, you're like, she's back what's you're doing today? I think it's one of the beauties of doing this deep research, you know? Yeah, there was this absolutely wonderful, sorry, this is very specific but a wonderful part of my research

where I looked at the manor records of a town in Somerset called Wellington and there was quite a few fragments and there's this wonderful kind of family feud, two families, the riches and the bowls. John and Alice Rich and John and Joan Boll.

and it just Alice Rich certainly didn't take any nonsense. There's all this. She accused John Boll of this and she stole his hay and then there's a wonderful bit actually in the handwritten record where the scribe is writing this man a court and Alice was accused of this and it actually says it is contraried written above her name added in and I think did she actually

she must have actually stood up and started you know yelling. You know, I refute this. I, while it was actually happening, and it just makes them feel so real in a way that historical people sometimes aren't, you know, when you just look at descriptions to actually see something like that. But yeah, the riches in the above, they're probably still arguing now. Wellington's not far from here. If I go down there at midnight, one night, and stand at the crossroads.

As we've already mentioned, one of the big things that you were looking at, when writing this book was how class has a differentiation in terms of what it is women are doing to an extent, right? So on the one hand, you have most women. They're out in the countryside. They are peasants. But then on the other hand, we also have townswomen. And what would you say is sort of the majority difference between the two groups? Okay.

Well, they lived, it's really interesting because these two groups of women, urban women, and rural women lived completely different lives. Their work was very different. But what they had in common was still that they were the Support Act for their family. So let's visualize a medieval town. It's probably got walls, it's got narrow streets. It's got houses that are quite close together

and also that get closer together and the further up that they go. So walking these streets can be a little bit claustrophobic. They're also quite crowded. They're noisy. There are shops open everywhere, people out doing their shopping, apprentices, yelling out their wares. It's a completely different experience from being in your cottage and your garden in the country. Now let's think of a business in that town. It doesn't really matter what it is, could be anything, but the business will be owned and run by a married man.

And his wife and children and apprentices will all, quote, help him run that business, which is shorthand for the business wouldn't run if it wasn't for the female contribution to it, but we don't acknowledge that officially. So the woman of the enterprise, the householder, the householder's wife, It's kind of like an old-fashioned.

I don't know whether anyone ever plays happy families anymore, this old-fashioned card game where the husband is Mr. Bunn, the Baker, and his wife is Mrs. Bunn, the baker's wife. But actually, she's running the business as much as he is. The fact that women were expected to be able to take over their husband's businesses at the drop of a hat, if anything happened to him, does kind of imply that everyone knew that these women were capable. It's just that we don't say it.

out loud. I guess that's always the issue, isn't it? Because one of the things that makes it incredibly difficult to study women's contributions in the Middle Ages is just this not saying it out loud. You know, the issue of covature by which you're Mrs. Bun, the baker's wife, you aren't your own person. Finding these women can be just incredibly exhausting. What kind of sources are you using to find these townswomen? Yeah, it's very difficult because, as you say, a lot of their work is just hidden. It's just filed under assistance, help, even domestic responsibilities.

So these businesses were run out of premises that were like house and shop and business all combined. So it's the business and the domestic altogether. And sometimes the woman's part of it just counted as domestic. But there are sort of, there are guild records. there are city business records. It's just a case of picking through them to find the few bits that relate to women. And I should say here,

I'm extremely grateful to the work of previous scholars because there are some published works now that have gone through all of those guild records and have picked out the bits that relate to women and published them. I mean, if I'd had to track down the original manuscript documents of everything that I needed to study in order to write this book. I would never have been able to do it. So I'm standing on the shoulders of previous scholars, as we all are.

And yet it's just a case of picking out these tiny bits. Like there'll be the records for payment on a building site, you know, for a cathedral or something in a city. And there'll be Tyler's and Masons. And every so often you'll just see a bit that says, and the Tyler and her assistant. were paid this and you go, oh, oh, quick, write that down. So, yeah, women were there.

It's just that they've largely just gone under the radar and you just have to be really careful. But just because they don't appear in the records, it doesn't mean that they weren't doing the work, is what I was trying to say, I think. And what you pointed out really well in the book, you know, is if we're looking, for example, at guilds membership, and as you've already mentioned,

we do see this assumption that women are doing the same trade as their husband, and that plays out when their husband dies. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so a guild, just for anyone who's not terribly familiar with the term, is like a professional organisation, and there would be one for each profession or trade in the town. So you've got the Baker's Guild and the drapers and the blacksmiths, you know, etc. and they had quite strict membership criteria and they regulated that trade.

So they regulated things like, I mean, in the baker's trade, it would be they would regulate how heavy loaves had to be and the quality of the ingredients, that kind of thing. And they would regulate entry to the trade by overseeing apprenticeships where boys and very occasionally girls, but I'll come back to that, were trained in that profession and could become a member of the guild. So most guilds have two levels of membership, masters and apprentices. Some of them also have an intermediate one for what's called journeyman.

And a journeyman is a qualified man who has finished his apprenticeship but he hasn't yet set up his own business probably because he's not married. And all of these are male. Now women who were married, to guild members could be a member of the guild as a sort of associate member called wife of, you know, you're the wife of a guild member. If one of those women's husbands died,

she was expected to take over running his business immediately. And the fact that this expectation was on her to do this straight away shows that she was just as knowledgeable about the trade as her husband was because if she was just starting from scratch because she'd just been in the house doing the washing up and not being involved with the business, she would need training in order to do this. But the expectation is that she will be able to take over straight away. So she could then take what had been her husband's place as a guild member. But again, again, we see this family influence. The widow can become. a guild member, but she still doesn't have rights on the same level as the male guild members,

because she can't stand for official office, you know, she can't stand in an election to be the head of the guild or whatever, and she also can't vote in those elections. So it's this subordinate thing. And as soon as she gets married again, if she does, her status immediately changes. If she gets married to another member of the same guild, she will immediately drop down to the category wife of again. And if she gets married to somebody from a different guild who works in a different position, she has to leave entirely because her new position as wife in another household automatically supersedes any experience or training or anything that she's got in what had been her own profession. So again, it's just wherever we look in medieval England, there's women leading these completely different lives.

And yet in some respects, it's just the same. They are the Support Act for their family. Yeah, I think that this is such an interesting point too, because we also see these really interesting patterns of intermarriage, right? So it tends to be that you marry a boy who is in the same guild that your father was because little girls are getting trained to do the same work as their father at the same rate that boys are. But again, we just don't talk about it, right? We just don't ever speak about the fact that these young ladies are being educated, you know? Yeah, some apprentices were girls, but it was run sort of slightly differently and you'll be unsurprised to learn

slightly more informally. So if the expectation on a young girl is that she's going to grow up and get married because that's the career choice. And so some girls were put into apprenticeships in a slightly different way. Not so much that they were expected to go and make this their own trade and their own profession,

but they needed to know enough so that when they married somebody who worked in that profession, they could start their married life, you know, they could sort of hit the ground running with being able to know about the business. And girls who were apprentices often started and finished at younger ages than boys. They were expected to get married younger.

So a male apprentice would probably start at the age of maybe 12, 13 and probably not finished until he was about 20. But a girl might be apprenticed in inverted commas when she was about eight or nine and she would have finished it by the time she was 15. And there were always clauses. If you ever got as far as having an official contract for a female apprentice,

there was always a clause that said her apprenticeship would terminate if she got married. Of course, obviously, you know. But no, look, I don't want to make this sad. I realize, like, you know, I'm probably sounding like this is all a huge moan fest about, you know, how terrible women's lives were. They did a lot of women manage to carve out.

good lives for themselves and particularly some of them there were some trades and professions that were female dominated so you know let's not get too depressing so I'm thinking here things like embroidery

silk weaving lace making these are really skilled tasks but they require quite soft hand I don't want to say women or had soft hands but if you were a

manual labourer, you'd find it difficult to make lace or, you know, or spin silk. And so they required slightly softer hands. There's a certain amount of dexterity involved. Yeah, that's the word I was looking for. Yeah, fine motor skills is what you needed. So, and, you know, you could, if you were good at it, you could make a living. Because interestingly, these sort of things, and also spinning as well, which is a very female coded. task, a lot of these were done by unmarried women. And because rather than being paid a salary or paid per hour, people who spun yarn and who wove silk and all that sort of thing, they were paid what's called piece work, which piece

P-I-E-C-E, as in a piece of, and they would get paid per how much of the product they created. So if you were really good at it, you could actually make enough of a living to support yourself, which is why spinster now can be used as a sort of derogatory term for an unmarried woman, you know, like an old spinster, but actually to be a spinster was skilled self-employment. And a lot of spinsters could choose to remain single if they wanted to because they were among the few women who could support themselves financially through their own efforts.

And we see this not just with spinning wool, but with, say, lace and embroidering silk as well. So there were, you know, there weren't as many opportunities for young women as they were for young men. But if you played your cards right, you could build a life that suited yourself. I think this is an incredibly important point, actually,

because part of the reason we use Spencer as a derogatory term is we still have this worry that medieval people have about women who are out of control. You know, women who are unmarried, women who have their own way of making money and are not reliant on a husband or a male family member. That is still something that we require to be derided because otherwise, well, women might start getting ideas, right? They might start thinking they're people or something like that. You have to know that it's very shameful, very, very shameful to not be a married woman, you know. Yeah, I mean, the only sort of acceptable alternative to being a married woman in the middle ages was to become a nun, which is not something that I've studied at all, so I won't get into it. But again, although these women are unmarried, they're still living in a controlled environment as nuns.

It's single women who live in the secular world who want to try and make their own way in the world that are slightly suspicious, slightly dangerous, the spinsters getting out of control. They might even talk to each other while they're spinning. Well, and that is actually something that we see a lot of stress about

in the Middle Ages as well as any of the parts of work for women where the women are talking and men aren't around. So, you know, we see a lot of stress about laundry day. We see a lot of stress about spinsterisces. And certainly later in the medieval period, we see a lot of stress about women going to ale houses together. Because there's this giant concern about what women might talk about when men aren't around. And it's all to do with the fact that the medieval society in England was set up to be patriarchal. and women were expected to be under the control of a household head who was normally male.

Sometimes the head of a household is a widow because widows who have been married, you know, have more status. But yeah, it's the idea of a woman just kind of flying around like a loose cannon and being independent just kind of freaked everybody out because they didn't know how to treat them. But there is still a bit of a stress about, widows as well, isn't it? Because we do see a lot of literature that paints widows as almost a sexual worry, very specifically, because here's a woman with no man in her life and rather a lot of money. And she's allowed to have that money, right? There's a place for her in the guild. Yeah. So widows are particularly dangerous, as you say, because they're women, but they have independence and authority. Now, they've gained that independence and authority because they have been married, but now they've got it all to themselves.

And there are some women who were widows who elected to remain widows so they could control their own businesses and their own income because they knew that as soon as they got married again, their status would change. Now, this is actually one of the things that sets townswomen very far apart from rural peasants. because it's quite difficult to be a widow, especially a young widow, if you live on a manor and you owe service to the manor. I mean, we've already spoken about how being the housewife was a full-time job. If you had to add doing three days a week labour in the Lord's fields to that,

it would be really difficult. So rural widows were more likely to marry again, simply because a household just didn't really function. But in a town, and particularly if you're in a trade that is more kind of trading and merchanting, I don't think that's a word, but rather than physically making, you know, if you were the widow of a man who made boots and you hadn't been trading, making, but that might be a bit more difficult. But if you're involved in buying and selling, you know, like wholesale wool or importing wine or something like that,

you might choose to remain a widow simply so that you could control that. Or occasionally women might do that if they had sons, they might remain widowed until their sons were grown up in order to take up the business. But yeah, it did give them choices. Uh-oh. We can't have that. That's terrible. I think you also touch on in the book the fact that, even within the context of being a town's woman in the context of being the wife of a guildsman,

there is also this sort of established women's work that you are doing that, again, we do not talk about, right? So much in the way that peasant women are scrubbing floors, for example, a lot of the townswomen are doing bookkeeping. And that that kind of shakes out in a very gendered way. Yeah, they're doing the work, particularly if it's a trade that involves fabricating something. Like I say, like making boots or something. The husband might do more of the fabricating, but the wife might be doing the buying and the selling and the working in the shop and the keeping the accounts. And this is all just work that comes under the heading of the household business.

So it's very difficult to see who did what. But like I say, that doesn't mean they weren't. doing the work. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't know who's doing it, I think the... Isn't there some saying that said throughout history,

anonymous, it's normally a woman. I can't remember who said that. It's usually a woman, yeah. If you can't, if you don't know who's doing it, probably it's a woman, probably. The person keeping it running behind the scenes,

you know, who's the man making boots, who's making him his dinner, who's feeding his apprentices and making sure they've got clothes to wear. You know, even work that probably wasn't even seen as work just to keep the domestic part of that household business running. It doesn't necessarily have to be all about the buying and selling. I mean, that wouldn't work unless there was somebody in the background, you know, washing the socks.

That's right. I mean, this is the thing. Someone needs to wash the socks, right? Someone needs to get dinner on the table. Someone has to scrub these floors. And who's doing that? I will tell you who for free. It's women, right? What we find, interestingly, is that trades that were female dominated, embroidering and so on, and also to some extent brewing, the brewing of ale, as they start to become more popular and they start to generate more income and become more professionalised, we start to see that they become more male dominated. So silk weaving is a really good example. The silk women of London in the sort of

earlier part of the Middle Ages were well known for organising, acting collectively, being a bit balshy if merchants were putting the prices up and working together and making money. And then gradually this got more professionalised. As it got more professionalised, some men started to come into the trade and then as more men came into the trade, it became more male-dominated. They started a guild which women weren't allowed to join. And by the time we reached sort of the end of the middle ages, the late 15th and early 16th century, no male silk worker was allowed to employ a woman

unless it was his own wife or daughter. And women were sort of pushed out. And we find this also with brewing. Brewing used to be the alewife making a bit extra while she was making it for a household and then going out and selling it. But then some women actually started brewing on a professional basis.

And men realised there was money to be made in this. And so gradually we see brewing becoming a more male-dominated activity. So every new generation of women had to sort of find their own niche of what they wanted to do that would allow them to, exercise their talents while also remaining kind of quasi-independent. I think this is a really

interesting point. And indeed, why I think this book is so important that I really think everyone should take a look at it. Because this is still a phenomenon we see today. You know, for example, computing used to be an entirely feminized industry. It used to be women who were crunching all the numbers behind the scenes. And as soon as it became quite lucrative, women were pushed out and it became considered to be a male industry. And we also see a concomitant thing, which is that if too many women enter an industry, it becomes devalued. Like, so for example, universities, as we're seeing at the moment, right, if you have too many academic women, it's like, oh, well, that's not very fancy anymore. Right. And so this is still something that we're very much struggling with. It's,

it's not just our medieval counterparts. Yeah, I was actually trying to be really careful in my book, not to say that out loud. I wanted to leave readers to decide for themselves. So all I'm saying is it was like this in the Middle Ages. And if readers choose to go, wow, it's not so different now. That's kind of up to them. Because, you know, I'm not only a medieval historian, but I do kind of live in the 12th and 13th century.

They don't really live in the modern world. You know, if people want to draw conclusions from that. But yeah, there were some bits that were. wildly different and other bits where you go, hang on. There's some advice literature for women. There's a particular book called The Night of Tour Laundries book for the Education of His Daughters, where he's, you know, and he's going,

don't wear too much makeup, don't pluck your eyebrows, don't be the first to try new fashions, you just look silly. And I thought, hmm. But there are other bits of his, you know, there are other bits of medieval advice literature that just are, horrendous when you read them now and you realize that in some ways medieval women really did live in a different world. It was a world that was designed to extract as much labor from them as possible,

whatever field that labour might have been in, while denying them authority and autonomy. And I think that's, you know, if I can sum up the whole book, it's like women were not individuals in their own rights. they were designed to be the support act for whatever family they were born into or married into. This is why I love the book and I think everyone needs to go and check it out because I feel as though we, now that women are allowed to be people, barely, but now that we're allowed to be individuals and we're allowed to have careers and these sorts of things, we're sort of doing a disservice to the women of the past if we don't go looking for them. You know, if we just say, yes, it just all was a domestic bliss whilst they sort of idly stirred a stew pot and dandled a baby on their

knee, you know, that is giving in to this particular culture which extracts the value but never pays attention to who was doing all of the work around here, right? Yeah, it's quite easy now to take for granted the rights that women have. I mean, Western women, let's not get into the rest of the world, but many women in industrialised societies. The rights that we have now, you know, we shouldn't take them for granted because they weren't always there. The Middle Ages was not this utopia. I know a lot of people have done a lot more work in the last sort of 20, 30 years on bringing historical women. women's lives more into the spotlight. But we shouldn't confuse this with thinking that the past

was some kind of feminist utopia because it wasn't. Well, I can't say fairer than that. Catherine, what a joy to have you on. Thank you so much for writing such an excellent book, and it's just been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much to Catherine once again for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you were interested in some of the topics that we mentioned in this episode, you might want to go back and check out our past episodes on real medieval women, and even women in the Crusades.

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