Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague

By Katherine L. French

The Black Death that arrived in the spring of 1348 eventually killed nearly half of England's population. In its long aftermath, wages in London rose in response to labor shortages, many survivors moved into larger quarters in the depopulated city, and people in general spent more money on food, clothing, and household furnishings than they had before. Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London looks at how this increased consumption reconfigured long-held gender roles and changed the domestic lives of London's merchants and artisans for years to come.

Grounding her analysis in both the study of surviving household artifacts and extensive archival research, Katherine L. French examines the accommodations that Londoners made to their bigger houses and the increasing number of possessions these contained. The changes in material circumstance reshaped domestic hierarchies and produced new routines and expectations. Recognizing that the greater number of possessions required a different kind of management and care, French puts housework and gender at the center of her study. Historically, the task of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos they create has been unproblematically defined as women's work. Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical, and French traces a major shift in women's household responsibilities to the arrival and gendering of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces in the decades after the plague.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812299533

Book preview

HOUSEHOLD GOODS AND GOOD HOUSEHOLDS IN LATE MEDIEVAL LONDON

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

HOUSEHOLD GOODS

AND

GOOD HOUSEHOLDS

IN

LATE MEDIEVAL

LONDON

Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague

Katherine L. French

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5305-4

For Kerry

By wisdom the house shall be built, and by prudence it shall be strengthened.

Proverbs 24:3

CONTENTS

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Challenges of Increased Consumption

Chapter 1. Living in London Before the Plague

Chapter 2. Valuing Household Goods

Chapter 3. Interior Decorating After the Plague

Chapter 4. Good Housekeeping in Post-Plague London

Chapter 5. Some Brought Flesh and Some Brought Fish

Chapter 6. When a Woman Labors with a Child

Chapter 7. Praying upon Beads

Conclusion. What Londoners Learned as They Learned to Live with More

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS, FIGURES, AND TABLES

MAPS

  1.      Medieval London and environs

  2.      Arrival points for plague in 1348

FIGURES

  1.    Distribution of wills leaving movable goods in the Commissary Court and the Prerogative Court of Canterbury

  2.    Cut-away view of an open-hall house

  3.    Burl on a maple tree

  4.    Fifteenth-century mazer

  5.    Fifteenth-century nut, or coconut cup

6a.    Percentage of wills leaving mazers, nuts, and metal cups in London, 1384–1540

6b.    Percentage of cups bequeathed by type in London, 1384–1540

  7.    Serpentine mazer (ca. 1500)

  8.    Late fifteenth-century ceramic tankard with bearded face

  9.    Historiated initial C with a woman in childbed (ca. 1490)

10.    Henry VII’s marriage bed

11.  Blind Tobit

12.    Robert Campin, Annunciation, Merode Altarpiece (1427–30)

13.    Detail of the Merode Altarpiece

14.    Roller-towel holder (1520–25)

15a.    Late medieval chest with a rounded top

15b.    Fifteenth-century chest with a flat top

16.    Beneficiaries receiving household goods by sex in London, 1384–1540

17.    Distribution of bequests of chests in London, 1384–1540

18.  Mid-fifteenth-century Italian cassone

19.    Cook using a meat hook and a skimmer

20.    Late fifteenth-century apostle spoon

21.    Wooden bowl

22a.  Pewter spoon

22b.  Detail of pewter spoon

23.    Late fifteenth-century paternoster

24.    Distribution of bequests of paternosters in London, 1384–1540

25.    Beneficiaries receiving paternosters by sex in London, 1384–1540

26.    Amber paternoster (ca. 1350–1400)

27.    Agnus Dei belt buckle (fourteenth or fifteenth century)

28.    Middleham Jewel

29.    Cramp ring (1308–1550)

30.    Late medieval turned jet bowl

31a.  Prayer scroll or birthing girdle

31b.  Printed birthing girdle (1533–34)

32.    Distribution of bequests of girdles in London, 1384–1540

33.    Beneficiaries receiving girdles by sex in London, 1384–1540

34.    Fifteenth-century Italian swaddling bands

35.    So-called cradle of Henry V (fifteenth century)

36.    Selection of pressed-metal toys

37.    London inventories with religious items

38.    Distribution of bequests of religious items in London, 1384–1540

39.    Metal holy water stoup (ca. 1066–1600)

40a.  Ceramic figurine of the Virgin Mary

40b.  Pressed-metal stand

41.    Recipients of religious books by sex in London, 1384–1540

42.    Sarum Use book of hours

43.    Devotional tablet

44.    Pressed-metal St. John’s head

45.    Terra-cotta cake or sweetmeat mold of St. Katherine (1450–1520)

46.    Recipients of religious items in London, 1384–1540

47.    Percentage of post-plague wills leaving moveable goods in Husting Wills, Commissary Court, and Prerogative Court of Canterbury

48.    Number of post-plague wills in Commissary Court and Prerogative Court of Canterbury

49a.  Percentage of wills in Commissary Court leaving moveable goods by sex

49b.  Percentage of wills in Prerogative Court of Canterbury leaving moveable goods by sex

50.    Chronological distribution of post-plague London inventories

TABLES

  1.    Occupations of those with post-plague inventories

  2.    Average wealth of households in three sets of post-plague inventories

  3.    Husting Wills with Moveable Goods, 1344–1428

  4.    Beneficiaries of Beds and Bedding in London, 1384–1540

5a.    Cooking Facilities in London’s Fourteenth-Century Inventories (1350–99)

5b.    Cooking Facilities in London’s Sixteenth-Century Inventories (1500–1544)

6a.    Meat-Cooking Capabilities in London’s Fourteenth-Century Inventories (1350–99)

6b.    Meat-Cooking Capabilities in London’s Sixteenth-Century Inventories (1500–1544)

  7.    Numbers of Post-Plague Inventories Used

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The questions that inspired this book emerged when I renovated my two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in New York’s Hudson Valley. Undoing unfortunate decisions from the 1980s repeatedly uncovered evidence of how differently previous owners had lived in this house. The original owners cooked and ate in the basement, and a ninety-five-year-old neighbor, who grew up in the house, told me that everywhere I had a bookcase, his family had a bed. As I write these acknowledgments, I am staying home trying to flatten the curve of COVID-19. I am increasingly aware of how living with a pandemic is changing how I live in my current house, but I have yet to learn which of these new behaviors will remain.

I started this book at SUNY–New Paltz and I finished it at the University of Michigan. In both places I have been extremely fortunate in having supportive colleagues. At New Paltz, I am particularly grateful to Lee Bernstein, Kathy Dowley, Andy Evans, Nancy Johnson, Susan Lewis, Heather Morrison, Lou Roper, and Michael Vargas; at Michigan, John Carson, Jay Cook, Deirdre de la Cruz, Hussein Fancy, Anna Bonnell Freidin, Tom Green, Dena Goodman, Sue Juster, Valerie Kivelson, Tori Langland, Brian Porter-Szucs, Helmut Puff, Cathy Sanok, Pat Simons, Minnie Sinha, and Paolo Squatriti have been tremendously supportive. My graduate students Haley Bowen, Sheree Brown, Bethany Donovan, Erin Johnson, Emily Price, Taylor Sims, and Shai Zamir also played an important role in this book. They offered their own insights, suggestions, citations, and enthusiasm. Taylor served as my Research Assistant at a crucial point in wrangling the Husting Wills, and Emily turned in the index with efficiency and timeliness. Sigrid Anderson and Alexa Pearce, librarians extraordinaire, were endlessly helpful in talking through setting up my databases, and the staff at Hatcher Library are all that a historian could want. Greg Parker sorted out many of my digital-image dilemmas. Corey Proctor of the office of CSCAR at the University of Michigan tested my data for statistical significance.

Beyond my academic homes I have also received much material, emotional, and intellectual support. Kate Kelsey Staples lent me her microfilm of the Husting wills; Maryanne Kowaleski gave much needed advice on databases; Thomas McSweeney helped with the legal tangle that is heirlooms, appurtenances, and Swinburne; Isabelle Cochelin pointed out the long legacy of Heloise’s objections to motherhood and housekeeping; Kathleen Kennedy shared her great knowledge on all things relating to coconuts; and Monica Green provided her expertise on medieval medicine. Justin Colson helped me learn to negotiate London’s wills and shared his Excel spreadsheet of the Commissary Court wills and his thoughts on medieval London. Shannon McSheffrey’s great knowledge of medieval London and numerous examples from her own elaborate databases appear throughout, and she shared flats and pints with me over the course of many trips to London. Christopher Mills, head of library, art, and archives collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, answered many questions about maples, and James Robinson, formerly of the British Museum, and Michael Willis of the British Museum arranged for me to actually handle the British Museum’s collection of mazers. Sonja Drimmer gave me valuable advice on finding the right medieval manuscript illustrations. Gordie Thompson made my maps. Libby Mulqueeny drew Figure 2, and Kate Gilbert edited the manuscript. Beth Alison Barr, Caroline Barron, Cordelia Beattie, Judith Bennett, Charlotte Berry, Martha Carlin, Mark Gardiner, Roberta Gilchrist, Richard Goddard, Christopher King, and Eleanor Standley all suggested works I needed to read, explained the finer points of their scholarship, and asked the right questions at the right time. David Constable, Ian Coulson, and Chris Pickvance generously provided images from their personal collections. At the last minute, many people, but particularly Anne Marie D’Arcy, Randy Schiff, and Jennifer Thibodeaux, provided full citations for things not digitized and unavailable during the COVID shut down. I am tremendously grateful for everyone’s help and encouragement.

In 2017, Elisheva Baumgarten invited me to participate in her ERC Working Group Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Further support was provided by the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University. The seminars, talks, and one-on-one discussions helped turn a loose collection of conference papers and articles into a book. I am so thankful for the input of all participants.

Initial archival research was funded in part by several Research and Creative Projects Awards and Term Faculty Development Awards from SUNY–New Paltz and the United University Professors. Hope Mahon helped transcribe the probate inventories as part of a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Grant. Once I moved to Michigan, funding for this project has been provided by the History Department and the J. Frederick Hoffman chair, which I am fortunate to hold.

A sabbatical in the spring of 2011 gave me the chance to start conceptualizing the project. My cousins Andrew and Erika Bradner lent me their house in Plum Beach, Rhode Island, while they were working abroad. A sabbatical in the academic year of 2018–19 let me finish writing the manuscript. In between, a leave in 2013–14 at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities provided the time, luxury, and intellectual stimulation to ask larger questions and figure out how I might answer them.

Previous portions of this book appeared as articles. I am delighted that Kathryn Smith and Sarah Stanbury agreed to write An Honest Bed: The Scene of Life and Death in Medieval England with me. It appeared in a special issue of Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of the Ancient and Medieval Pasts 5 (2016): 61–95. The special issue was the brainchild of Robin Fleming. Her belief in the value of collaboration and interdisciplinarity fueled by good food have had a profound impact on this book. Other parts of this book were published as Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and Its Suburbs, Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 2 (2016): 126–48; and Nouveaux arts de la table et convivialitiés sexuées: Angleterre, fin de l’époque médiévale, Clio 40, no. 1 (2014): 45–67.

I am delighted to be working again with Jerry Singerman and Ruth Karras at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Gratitude also to the anonymous readers, whose comments and criticisms have helped improve the book, and for the hard work of copyeditor Jennifer Shenk.

As the acknowledgments show, writing a book requires the forbearance of many. The difficulties, exasperations, and triumphs are more bearable and sweeter for sharing them. Robin Fleming, Gary Gibbs, Shannon McSheffrey, and Allyson Poska have all been with me since this project was just an old house with a flooding basement in the Hudson Valley. They all read versions of the entire manuscript and it is better for their suggestions, wisdom, and time. I am immensely grateful for their support, input, and friendship.

Last is my family, who share my fascination with old houses, and Kerry, whose wide technical knowledge was frequently helpful and his encouragement always appreciated. This book is for him.

Introduction

The Challenges of Increased Consumption

In 1990, when the borders of the former Czechoslovakia opened up, busloads of Czechs flocked to Vienna. Standing in a department store, I watched women surround the toiletry and perfume displays excitedly trying all the free samples. The Eastern bloc’s controlled economy had famously limited access to such luxury items, and my first vision of the fall of Communism was women applying scented lotion to their hands and faces.¹ Greater access to new products would change the lives of residents of the former Soviet bloc in ways big and small. A beauty regimen requires money for products, a place to store them, and time for a routine to use them. These changes have repercussions for domestic habits and relationships because people and their things are entangled in dense and unpredictable ways, with material culture structuring behavior and interactions and creating unexpected dependencies with unforeseen consequences.²

Dramatic rises in consumption, such as the one that accompanied the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, have social repercussions. Indeed, the move from a user to a consumer society is often understood as a hallmark of modernity.³ A similar change took place in the mid-fourteenth century, in the years following the so-called Black Death. As a consequence of devastating population loss over two years, wages and consumption rose. This book looks at changes to domestic material culture after this great mortality: the things people bought to furnish their houses, the houses they lived in, and the changes in domestic behavior, identity, and gender roles that emerged from these material changes. I focus on London’s merchants and artisans, those most intimately connected to trade, manufacturing, and consumption in England’s largest city. Within a time frame of 1300 to 1540, 1348/49 stands as a pivotal moment that unleashed economic changes that in turn shaped the story of the material changes explored in this book.

I have chosen London because of its economic and cultural importance to England, the abundance of its surviving sources, and the city’s rich historiography.⁴ By 1300, London had achieved self-rule, and merchant and artisan companies were entrenched in both its city government and economic life. It was a marketplace for the luxuries imported by both the Italians and the Hanseatic League, and it was home to immigrants whose aspirations fueled manufacturing and domestic service in the workshops and houses of London’s merchants and artisans.⁵

The period of this study, 1300–1540, is generally understood as a time of economic contraction sandwiched between the growth and maturation of the medieval economic system in the twelfth century and the rapid expansion of the sixteenth century. This time frame includes a variety of interrelated environmental, political, and economic crises, the most notable of which is the appearance of bubonic plague in Europe for the first time in six hundred years. In the mid-fifteenth century the European economy went into a serious recession.⁶ The fifteenth century is something of an enigma for historians, as is reflected in the various ways it is periodized: the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the early modern period. This protracted economic crisis, I argue, resolved questions about household behavior that had emerged with the expansion of trade in the twelfth century but became more pressing after the initial outbreak of plague. An end date of 1540 legitimately raises the question of how long after 1348 we can talk about the plague’s consequences. The Black Death was not an emotional reference point for the sixteenth century, but it had initiated a demographic and economic dynamic that makes the two centuries after the plague worth considering in their totality. My endpoint of 1540 sees the population and commerce recovering, but avoids the economic impact of overseas colonization and slavery, which would change England’s economy and consumption habits yet again.⁷

Ever since the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga characterized the late Middle Ages as morbid and death-obsessed, scholars have debated how much responsibility should be given to the plague as a catalyst for cultural and social transformation.⁸ This debate is beset by a number of conceptual questions. To what degree was the plague a major driver of change, and in what ways was it simply an accelerator of trends already under way, particularly those coming from the expansion of commerce in the twelfth century? How do we see, measure, and understand its impact on medieval society and culture? And if institutions, policies, and material culture endured from before the plague, can we talk about the Black Death as bringing change?⁹ To some degree this is a debate about whether economics or population drive change.¹⁰

While the drama of the Black Death’s appearance attracts most historiographical attention, its sudden appearance in the fourteenth century was tied in with broader climate changes that had started at the end of the twelfth century.¹¹ Both its name, which does not have medieval origins, and its massive mortality rate feed dire visions of what it was like to live in the Middle Ages.¹² Now conclusively identified as bubonic plague, over the course of five years this disease spread via trade routes out of the Steppes of Asia into the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and northern Europe, killing between a third and half of the population.¹³ Had there been only this one outbreak, the population would have recovered, but the plague returned every fifteen years or so, and consequently England’s population would remain low until the beginning of the sixteenth century.¹⁴ A stagnant population was a new demographic dynamic for England.¹⁵ Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries, the medieval population had largely expanded. With land as a measure of status and a source of food, not enough land for the growing population meant that the value of English land escalated, while the status of most people declined. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was an increasing population of landless poor, and England could barely feed itself. The massive loss of life in 1348/49 reversed this situation. There was an immediate and severe labor shortage. To attract workers, employers offered higher wages and better lease terms, and within a generation serfdom had all but disappeared. With their newfound wealth, workers spent a smaller percentage of their income on food and were able to spend more on clothing, bigger houses, household furnishings, and entertainment. Wages would remain high until the end of the fifteenth century, giving workers new buying power.¹⁶

Economic historians have argued that in the short term, post-plague economic conditions led to a rise in consumption. To some scholars, this increase was significant enough to be understood as a consumer revolution. While revolution is a term that historians often adopt, the hallmarks of post-plague consumption, like the consumer revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, included structural increases in demand driven by rising wages, social mobility, the greater availability of luxury goods, and a growing sense that identity could be expressed by choice in goods.¹⁷ Whether or not we use terms like revolution, the fourteenth century’s increase in consumption had social repercussions: this book seeks to understand what London’s merchants and artisans learned as they learned to buy, use, and live with more stuff not only right after the plague, but in the generations that followed.¹⁸

Some scholars have understood this increased consumption in terms of bourgeois material acquisition that was part of the rise in urbanism and commerce in the twelfth century.¹⁹ I do not dispute these continuities, but these preexisting economic and political processes have material consequences that were influenced by massive population decline visited upon a stagnating economy.²⁰ Survivors and their families had possibilities that they would not have had otherwise, and they realized them in ways that were particular to their status, ambition, and experience. Bruce Campbell argues that the combined effects of climate change, extreme population decline, and economic and governmental responses brought broad structural changes to medieval society.²¹ Regardless of where one places one’s emphasis, the multiple and integrated crises of the fourteenth century had a knock-on effect on how people lived for the next few centuries. This book looks at what that response looked like in the short and long term as a new population and economic dynamic took over and survivors and their descendants lived in a very different world.

Material culture provides a witness to changes and continuities after the plague in ways that textual narratives and economic sources do not. Those who lived through the first, second, and third epidemics were both too aware and not aware enough of what was changing and what was staying the same. Immediate political, moral, and economic concerns created a horizon beyond which chroniclers found it difficult to see, and moral paradigms and biblical precedents made it difficult to identify and explain change. And indeed, chroniclers ultimately accepted the plague as a seasonal event, and doctors wrote treatises that proffered cures.²² Regular appearances normalized it, people adapted to it, and life and culture continued, weaving the old with the new in often unremarkable and unnoticed ways. On the other hand, changes to London’s merchant and artisan houses and their furnishings between 1350 and 1540 provide a different way of thinking about the world after the Black Death. Changes made to houses and their furnishings in the first generation after the plague changed the way people lived. As residents added new items and replaced old ones, old expectations confronted new habits. Tracing these material changes to houses specifically includes the experiences of women and the implications for gender roles. As sites of social reproduction, houses and their furnishings frame routines, shape behavior, underlie expectations, and ultimately order a universe. Houses serve as a negotiation space for residents, as structures that compel the individual to meet the municipality, and as places to shelter occupants from the crowd.²³

More furnishings and bigger houses require accommodation from humans to be useful, to endure, and even to be ignored. They change how people live, how they raise their children, and how they interact with each other and their polity. These accommodations shape human movement and behavior, and, in so doing, they consciously and unconsciously produce routines, expectations, and memories. Accommodations do not happen in a vacuum, but are themselves informed by previous accommodations, expectations, and behaviors. Pierre Bourdieu called this process habitus. He writes, In short, the habitus, the product of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history.²⁴ This internal sense of how things and spaces ought to be arranged, deployed, and accommodated creates identity, based not only on economic status but also on behavior. As archaeologist Ian Hodder argues, Who I am as a person is dependent on the equipmental contexts in which I dwell.²⁵ London’s merchants and artisans and their wives definitely wished to make meaningful statements about themselves and their households with their adoption of new objects and their new uses for familiar ones, but they rooted these claims in their own memories, expectations, and habits. When these claims are strung together and compared over time, they reveal the changes and continuities in self-presentation, household behavior, and social expectations in the period after the plague.²⁶

Because it is impossible to predict all the ways that one might use objects or foretell the consequences of these choices, the rise of consumption in post-plague London had repercussions for how Londoners would come to define what was acceptable behavior for men and women, both inside and outside the house.²⁷ A house was a home to a family, which the king, city leaders, and Christian theologians all understood as a moral, ideological, and legal unit, one created through the sacrament of marriage.²⁸ In a world organized around patriarchal authority, Christian duty, and adherence to the law, household behavior was either a credit or a liability to the house and the men who had charge over it. Patriarchal authority put controlling women’s behavior front and center in the making and breaking of household reputations. Women’s chastity and fidelity were important, but so were their speech, movements, and labor. Controlling women was more than simply constraining their movements and interactions; it was also defining and evaluating their behavior and activities. The late Middle Ages increasingly defined women’s good behavior as demure, modest, and passive and their mobility as limited.²⁹ Whether or not women adhered to these expectations, medieval urban society came to believe that women’s use of their houses and their contents had moral implications. At the same time, women were not unwitting dupes in the perpetuation of these ideologies. Women both acquiesced to and resisted this process, giving any interaction between them and things multiple possibilities. The morality that came to be embedded in houses and their furnishings by the mid-fifteenth century was a negotiation, informed both positively and negatively by the beliefs and priorities of medieval society, the realities of embodied needs inside the home, and the possibilities of consumption for their families.³⁰

Looking at the material culture of households requires exploring gender dynamics and labor. Historically, housework, the low-status work of managing bodies and things and the dirt and chaos that they create, has been unproblematically defined as women’s work.³¹ Housework, however, is neither timeless nor ahistorical. The arrival of new possessions and the creation of new household spaces give women’s household activities a history. Part of learning to live with more was deciding who could legitimately use particular items, when, where, and how. Proper use was, therefore, coded not simply by status but also by gender. Gendered use of particular items, such as weapons, created and reinforced gender roles, but in the wake of increased consumption, the gender coding of many new household furnishings would be up for grabs. Following the decisions that Londoners made about the legitimate use of their household possessions offers a way of historicizing both women’s housework and patriarchy.³² The evolving gender codes of particular items and the activities and behaviors that they created were some of the lessons Londoners learned as a consequence of learning to live with more things.

Not only did the rise in consumption after the plague change how merchants and artisans lived in their houses, but these changes ultimately created a social identity, or burgeis ethos, to use Felicity Riddy’s term, among merchants and artisans.³³ These changes did not happen overnight, but took about a century to become visible in our surviving records. Many scholars doubt that London’s merchants and artisans shared a common social identity or constituted a coherent social group or class. Wealth was a powerful divider. Merchants ranked higher than artisans, had greater access to political office, and had more international experience; wholesalers frequently fought—literally—with retailers.³⁴ This was true before the plague and it would remain so afterward.³⁵ Before the plague, rich merchants also lived very differently from how modest ones lived. With the rise in consumption after the plague, however, rich and modest merchants and artisans developed common practices of household furnishing and domestic organization, despite differences in the size of their households and workshops. These shared habits and routines, their habitus, meant that despite differences in wealth merchants and artisans had come to inhabit their domestic spaces in similar ways, because these spaces embodied shared values of hierarchy, gender, piety, industry, and civic participation.³⁶ The development of shared habits and behaviors across a spectrum of wealth clearly disturbed some people, and the fifteenth century was also a time when institutions, such as parish and civic guilds, tried to become more restrictive.³⁷ Sumptuary legislation, which tried to define appropriate clothing by rank, was another response.³⁸

Nevertheless, whether London’s richest and poorest merchants and artisans ever sought common cause in city politics, socialized with each other, or intermarried is not the only basis of what I believe we can see as a shared identity among them. Houses and the behaviors they create sit at the nexus of law, theology, economics, and routine. Owning or leasing a house in London required participation in layers of city bureaucracy and law, which in turn mapped the property’s location and history through the documentation process, so tenants and owners could buy, sell, lease, and bequeath it. Their shared acquiescence to this process happened inside the all-encompassing framework of Christian theology, parish membership, and the necessary literate practices of commerce and law. They bound London’s merchants and artisans and their households together in ways that were meaningful to them and that distinguished them in recognizable ways from others. Although there was a recognized ranking of the city’s guilds, guild membership provided another commonality that members, regardless of wealth, vigorously articulated through rituals and events and defended in court and debate.³⁹ After the plague, the particularities of commerce and urban citizenship made merchants and artisans live in their houses differently from how elites and peasants lived and similarly to each other, in ways that transcended the differences in wealth.

The demographic crisis and emotional trauma after the plague must also have put a great deal of pressure on social identities.⁴⁰ Trauma has medical and psychological definitions that I am wary of applying to medieval people given our evidence, and medieval narrative sources make cultural trauma difficult to recognize, but the work of sociologists can help us identify it in our sources. Jeffrey Alexander defines cultural trauma as occurring when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.⁴¹ For Alexander, identifying responsibility is important. The Black Death, unlike the Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide, had no human perpetrators motivated by politics or racism, so the consequences did not lead to rethinking identity and memory in the same way. But sudden social upheaval, whether initiated by humans or by climate change, brings with it its own trauma when communities are lost, moral chaos reigns, resources are reallocated, and violence breaks out, all of which happened in London after the plague.⁴² As Londoners moved on from these events, new routines, values, and habits that grew out of this crisis were perpetuated and elaborated on, leaving residues of trauma in everyday behaviors, even after its immediate memory had faded.

For survivors of the plague, their children, and their grandchildren, social identity and community belonging were unraveling. With upwards of 30 percent of London’s guild masters dead, London’s commercial world was devastated.⁴³ While most merchants and artisans were born outside of London both before and after the plague, integrating newcomers into London’s guild culture afterward presented challenges because of the sheer numbers of new men bringing new ideas and different customs and behaviors all at once.⁴⁴ Many, moreover, did not come from the right families or have the best connections. New opportunities for consumption allowed them to live differently, even as they climbed the guild hierarchy. The urgent need to restore the world necessitated social integration and social reproduction, which compelled merchants and artisans to define themselves. Houses, their furnishings, and the behaviors that occupants created through their use and protection served as sites both of social reproduction and social regeneration.

Sources and Methods

The kinds of sources a historian uses shape the narrative that emerges. The majority of texts used for this book are the wills and inventories of London’s merchants and artisans and their households. Both types of texts are legal documents created to track possessions of monetary worth. Through a last will and testament, those who were dying made provisions for both their souls and their movable and immovable goods. Two hundred and forty years of wills preserve changing inheritance patterns, the rise and decline in appreciation for particular items, and the different ways memories and expectations accrued to things. Changes in the inheritance patterns of chattels serve as a proxy for seeing changes in attitudes toward possession and what Londoners learned as they learned to live with more possessions. Inventories over the same period provide a list of household items, their values, and sometimes even their locations within the house. They complement the information provided by wills, capturing the introduction of new rooms and furnishings and how owners grouped particular things in their house. This information illustrates something of how residents arranged and lived in their houses. Archaeological finds also play a role in this book, but for London, most artifacts are recovered from the Thames shore or trash dumps, not in situ, obscuring their household contexts.⁴⁵ They do, however, provide tangible evidence of a range of goods that rarely appear in the written records, such as wooden and ceramic items. Archaeology provides a basis in reality for the legal formula and terminology that dominate wills and inventories, making it possible to use these often-intractable documents for social history.

Technically, wills disposed of real property, and testaments bequeathed movable goods or chattels, but conventionally we use the term will when discussing both.⁴⁶ The medieval Church enjoined all Christians to make a last will and testament. London law more particularly required residents with goods valued at £10 or more to write one, as well as any citizen whose death created issues regulated by borough custom, such as burgage tenure and the care of orphans.⁴⁷ These value thresholds, the cost of making and probating a will, and the law of coverture, which prohibited married women from making a will without their husband’s permission,⁴⁸ meant that most Londoners probably never made a will, skewing any study using them in favor of men with property.⁴⁹

Rooted in a society where land was the basis of power, English common law paid much more attention to the disposal of land (immovable goods) than chattels (movable goods).⁵⁰ In cities, however, movables were not only the basis of merchant and artisan life; they had great monetary value as well, so paying attention to them allows us not only to track the ways households and families lived and interacted with their household furnishings and each other, but to take into account a significant portion of the wealth of Londoners.

Usually individuals made their will shortly before death, although merchants often wrote theirs prior to setting out on a long journey. This means that the majority of testators are male, and because of coverture, the majority of female testators are widows. Moreover, the majority of male testators were married. By and large, widows were breaking up a household, while most male testators were trying to provide for their families. As a result, married men mention movable goods less frequently than widowed women.⁵¹

Common law allowed a married man to dispose of his property and chattels as he wished during his lifetime, including anything his wife brought with her when they married. When he died, his property, both movable and immovable, was subject to the law. London law required a third, called her dower, to go to his widow, and third to his children, and the final third he could dispose of as he chose. He was free to leave his wife more, but he could not leave her less.⁵² Richard Helmholz has questioned how much common law actually enforced division of a married man’s property, but many London testators refer to these rules in their wills.⁵³ With such strictures, many men’s wills are brief, with only dispositions for the soul and body, a reutterance of the legal expectations, and no delineation of any property. Dower, called free bench in London, gave a widow life use of a share in her husband’s house and furnishings and life interest in a third of his lands and/or tenements, from which she could derive income.⁵⁴ While a wife could not make a will without her husband’s permission, widows were free to do so, and the paucity of married women’s wills suggests that most couples accepted this legal limitation.⁵⁵ Widows had fewer restrictions on how they could dispose of their possessions, but they could not alienate their free bench. Despite these limitations, wills constitute an important source of women’s writings. Looking at how they described, disposed of, and interacted with their household goods reveals women’s perspectives on their households, information that is otherwise unavailable.⁵⁶

To identify and analyze changes in how testators and assessors documented household furnishings, I have applied both quantitative and qualitative methods to a sample of London wills made between 1344 and 1540. Because of the sheer number that survive, wills are in some ways well suited to quantitative analysis, but their legal underpinnings and formulaic nature make both quantitative and qualitative approaches chancy. Used together, however, both methods allow these often anodyne and terse documents to reveal a wealth of information about changing behaviors and attitudes toward household possessions. Quantitative methods prevent overgeneralization from a single copiously detailed will, but qualitative methods allow for the details from an unusually informative text to be meaningfully contextualized.

London has wills surviving from many different courts, covering different territories and legal jurisdictions. The longest and earliest sequence of wills is from London’s own Court of Husting, beginning in 1258 and continuing into the seventeenth century. This court primarily dealt with landed property.⁵⁷ Ecclesiastical courts had the capacity to deal with both movables and immovables, but the documents they generated begin only after the plague.⁵⁸ Of the four ecclesiastical courts handling London wills, the Commissary Court (CC) and Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) have the earliest and longest series of wills—starting in the 1370s and 1380s respectively. Thousands of wills survive for these three courts. I sampled the Husting, Commissary, and Prerogative Courts in five-year segments every fifteen years, using only those wills from testators who identified themselves as citizens, merchants, artisans, or members of their households living within the city’s walls. I discuss my sampling process more fully in the Appendix. I have included just over three thousand post-plague wills in my analysis, almost half of which left movable goods of some kind. Movable goods gradually become more common as bequests in the two hundred years following the plague (Figure 1).

Theoretically, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury was for testators with property in more than one diocese, while the Commissary Court was for those with property only in the city of London. As a result, those using the Prerogative Court tended to be wealthier. Because wills rarely include a full statement of an estate’s total value, it is difficult to categorically demonstrate the greater wealth of Prerogative Court testators, but there are several indicators that show this trend. In my sample of Prerogative Court wills, twenty, or 7 percent of the male testators, were aldermen, while only one male testator in my Commissary Court sample claimed this status. While 62 percent of the Prerogative Court testators belonged to one of the twelve great companies, only 28 percent of male testators in the Commissary Court did. In the Commissary Court sample, 10 percent of male testators also belonged to the lesser guilds, such as the bakers, carpenters, joiners, tilers, and fletchers, compared to only 3 percent from the Prerogative Court. The Prerogative Court sample also had fewer female testators, only 9 percent compared to 18 percent of