The Ties That Bound by Barbara A. Hanawalt

Hanawalt combines a statistical analysis of manorial court records with the accidental deaths reported in the coroner's rolls. If reading The Ties that Bound does not bring any revelations, it is only because, in the quarter of a century since its publication, it has become so foundational to our study of the medieval family and English peasantry. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions.

Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us.

The Ties That Bound by Barbara A. Hanawalt