1 This is the first of a pair of articles. I explore here the evidence of marriage and non-marriage in the Weston inventory, and in ‘Wretched girls, wretched boys, and the European marriage pattern in England (c. 1250–1350)’, forthcoming in the next issue of Continuity and Change, I consider further evidence of the presence in thirteenth-century England of a distinctive pattern of late marriage and non-marriage.

2 Jones, E. D., ‘Some economic dealings of Prior John the Almoner of Spalding, 1253–74’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 12 (1977), 41–7Google Scholar.

3 Most of the early manorial records of Spalding Priory survive in two medieval compilations. British Library (hereafter BL) Add Ms 35296, compiled sometime in the early 1330s, contains copies of thirteenth-century surveys of priory manors, as well as lists of servile offspring in Spalding, Moulton, and Weston. The Myntling Register, held by the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, was compiled by the priory's librarian Laurence Myntling in the 1470s; he copied into it extracts of fines paid by priory serfs, starting in 1253–1254. Myntling dated these extracts by both regnal year and prioral year, but his two methods do not coincide; because the original documents were probably dated by prioral years, I have used these throughout. In citing from this volume, which is discussed more fully below, I have used the modern pagination.

4 BL Add Ms 35296, fos. 221v–223v.

5 Case 15 provides an especially clear example of inconsistency of tenses; it reports that John son of Osbert ‘habuit/had’ children (is he dead?) and that these children are living under his care (so he might still be alive?).

6 The Moulton inventory (BL Add Ms 35296, fos. 209–211v) is titled ‘Of sons and daughters: an inquest made of the serfs of the lord prior in Moulton’ (on fo. 209, servorum (serfs) is erased and replaced by nativorum (neifs), but the original appears in the calendar on fo. 4). The Moulton list is undated but Hallam considered it contemporary with Weston, which is plausible, given their similar formats. It contains 96 entries and provides the names of 182 sons and 144 daughters, but unlike Weston, more offspring are young and still at home, and even more strikingly, no information (except name) is given for more than 60 offspring. The Spalding inventory (BL Add Ms 35296, fos. 192v–194v) is titled ‘Names of the children of villeins (de rusticis) of lord J[ohn] prior in the vill of Spalding’. Hallam originally thought this inventory was compiled at the same time as those for Weston and Moulton, but he later moved the date back to 1253–1259, based on ‘internal evidence’. Hallam, H. E., ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, Economic History Review 10, 3 (1958), 340CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hallam, H. E., ‘Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252–1478’, Population Studies 39, 1 (1985), 55–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, here 57. This earlier date is certainly more correct, for the inventory predates a Spalding survey (BL Add 35296, fos. 172v–192v, dated on fo. 186), taken in the 7th year of Prior John the Almoner (1259–1260): some men in the inventory were dead by the time of the survey. The inventory was likely undertaken soon after Prior John took office in 1253. It contains 113 entries. Nine males and three females are described in ways that suggest they were unmarried (per se; singularis; or listed after offspring, as a sibling of the head-father); two sons are noted as clerics; and one son, whose children are named, was likely married. The vast majority of offspring (167 males and 153 females) are merely named without further information. Digital images of the Weston, Moulton, and Spalding serf inventories are available in the Carolina Digital Repository, accessible online: https://dx.doi.org/10.17615/n29w-9n61.

7 Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, 340–56; Hallam, H. E., ‘Population density in medieval fenland’, Economic History Review 14, 1 (1961), 71–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 J. C. Russell, ‘Demographic limitations of the Spalding serf lists’, Economic History Review 15, 1 (1962), 138–44; H. E. Hallam, ‘Further observations on the Spalding serf lists’, Economic History Review 16, 2 (1963), 338–50.

9 Hallam read the tenses as more consistent than they are, claiming that each head-father who ‘habuit/had’ children was dead. Russell thought that children described as living with their fathers (cum patre) had lost their mothers.

10 For Hallam, compare cases 35 (Fitte), 37 (Hare), 39 (Ringolf), and 53 (Kitoun) in the appendix to the families he describes in ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, 358. For Russell, see his list in ‘Demographic limitations’, 139–40; Hallam's comments on this list in ‘Further observations’, 341n; and cases 26–40 in the appendix.

11 See, for example, summary discussions in Fleming, Peter, Family and household in medieval England (Basingstoke, 2001), 65–70Google Scholar, and Hinde, Andrew, England's population: a history since the Domesday survey (London, 2003), 17Google Scholar. For up-to-date, socially specific estimates, see Campbell, Bruce M. S., The great transition: climate, disease and society in the late-medieval world (Cambridge, 2016), 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar (table 3.4).

12 Smith, Richard M., ‘Hypothèses sur la nuptialité en Angleterre aux XIIIe-XIVe siècles’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 38 (1983), 107–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Smith, Richard M., ‘Demographic developments in rural England 1300–1348: a survey’, in Campbell, Bruce M. S. ed., Before the Black Death: studies in the ‘crisis’ of the early fourteenth century (Manchester, 1991), 25–78Google Scholar, esp. 67–9.

13 Jones, E. D., ‘Death by document: a re-appraisal of Spalding Priory's census evidence for the 1260s’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 39 (1995), 54–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 69.

14 Jones was right, for example, to dismiss (on 59) Smith's assumption that all children noted as parvuli were less than five years old, but he himself wrongly assumed that the clerk's use of habet and habuit indicated whether the head-father was alive or dead.

15 For the first quotation, see Coss, Peter, ‘Neifs and villeins in later medieval England’, Reading Medieval Studies 40 (2014), 192–202Google Scholar, here 201; for the second quotation, see Bailey, Mark, The decline of serfdom in late medieval England: from bondage to freedom (Woodbridge, 2014), 58Google Scholar. Although Bailey mentions (301) that a jury in Tingewick (Buckinghamshire) was ordered to produce information about serf offspring in 1368, no list has survived, so the Durham Priory lists, beginning in 1378, are the earliest extant post-plague lists (Larson, Peter L., Conflict and compromise in the late medieval countryside: lords and peasants in Durham, 1349–1400 (London, 2012), esp. 156–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 221–2, 251, n. 41). See additional discussions of surviving serf lists in: Bailey, Decline of serfdom, 276–7, 301; Lomas, Tim, ‘South-east Durham: late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in Harvey, P. D. A. ed., The peasant land market in medieval England (Oxford, 1984), 254–327Google Scholar, esp. 257–8; Lomas, Richard, North-east England in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1992), 178–9Google Scholar; Russell, Josiah Cox, British medieval population (Albuquerque, 1948), 166–9Google Scholar; Field, R. K., ‘Migration in the later Middle Ages: the case of the Hampton Lovett villeins’, Midland History 8 (1983), 29–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christopher Dyer, Lords and peasants in a changing society: the estates of the bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (1980), esp. 230–2; and Dyer, Christopher, ‘Villeins, bondsmen, neifs, and serfs: new serfdom in England, c. 1200–1600’, in Freedman, Paul and Bourin, Monique eds., Forms of servitude in northern and central Europe: decline, resistance, and expansion (Turnhout, 2005), 419–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also this exchange centred on the fifteenth-century Myntling Register of Spalding Priory: Jones, E. D., ‘Going round in circles: some new evidence for population in the later Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 329–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailey, Mark, ‘Blowing up bubbles: some new demographic evidence for the fifteenth century?’, Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989), 347–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, E. D., ‘A few bubbles more: the Myntling Register revisited’, Journal of Medieval History 17 (1991), 263–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Myntling Register, fos. 260v–263 and 267v–271v. Interspersed with these fealty lists are entries about fines imposed on neifs (for manumission, living away from the estate, marriage, and the like).

17 Myntling Register, fos. 12–197v.

18 Jones, ‘Going round in circles'; Bailey, ‘Blowing up bubbles'; Jones, ‘A few bubbles more’.

19 Myntling provided, for example, two overlapping pedigrees of the Bele family, one for Spalding and another for Moulton. He identified two Bele women (Margaret and Sarah) as sisters of Nicholas Bele in one pedigree but as his aunts in the other; he implausibly gathered together as a single generation seven sisters who made their first marriages as early as 1306 and as late as 1335; and he ignored altogether Cecily, a daughter of Thomas Bele. For the Bele pedigrees, see Myntling Register, fo. 42v (Spalding) and fo. 118v (Moulton); for the marriages of the Bele sisters reported in the Moulton pedigree, see fos. 223, 225, 230, 233; for Cecily, see fo. 234. Myntling might have had access to the full run of court rolls for Spalding Priory; all we have today are the extracts (presumably made by him or a predecessor) that he copied into his volume. Some of his sources are lost today, and he seems not to have had access to the thirteenth-century serf inventories and land surveys in BL Add Ms 35296.

20 For another (also flawed) attempt by manorial clerks to reconstruct a villein pedigree from written records, see Schofield, Phillipp R., ‘Lordship and the peasant economy, c. 1250–c.1400: Robert Kyng and the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’, Past & Present, 195 suppl. 2 (2007), 53–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Hyams, Paul R., King, lords and peasants in medieval England: the common law of villeinage in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.

22 BL Add Ms 35296, fos. 172v–192v (Spalding); 194v–209 (Moulton); 212–221v (Weston). H. E. Hallam makes extensive use of these surveys in his Settlement and society: a study of the early agrarian history of south Lincolnshire (Cambridge, 1965).

23 Jones, E. D., ‘The exploitation of its serfs by Spalding Priory before the Black Death’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999), 126–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 151.

24 Smith, ‘Hypothèses’.

25 Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses'; Hallam, ‘Further observations'; Russell, ‘Demographic limitations'; Jones, ‘Death by document’.

26 Jones, ‘Death by document’, 67. For neifty as a form of chattel ownership, see Hyams, King, lords and peasants.

27 Miller, Edward and Hatcher, John, Medieval England: rural society and economic change 1086–1348 (London, 1978), 113Google Scholar. Bastards either acquired the status of their mothers or were ipso facto free.

28 As usual, there are occasional exceptions (see case 10). Note also that the inventory ignored at least one stepdaughter, presumably because she did not inherit servility from her stepfather (case 11).

29 Widows were not liable for leyrwites in Weston, and their merchets were distinctively paid by their new husbands who at once acquired both wife and land (see cases 39, 46, and 48). In case 56, the usual formula is abandoned in order to avoid listing a mother at the head-position.

30 On frankpledge entry at age 15, see Hallam, ‘Age at first marriage’, 63.

31 Laslett, Peter, ‘Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century’, in Laslett, Peter ed., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972), 125–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 145 (see table 4.7).

32 Historians working with the poll tax of 1377 have variously estimated that 35 to 50 per cent of the population was aged less than 14 years. Russell, British medieval population, 118–46; Postan, M. M., The medieval economy and society: an economic history of Britain in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1975), 33Google Scholar; Smith, ‘Demographic developments’, 48; Richard M. Smith, ‘Plagues and peoples; the long demographic cycle, 1250–1670’, in Slack, Paul and Ward, Ryk eds., The peopling of Britain: the shaping of a human landscape (Oxford, 2002), 177–209Google Scholar, esp. 178–9.

33 Myntling Register, fos. 212–266v. The extensive historical literature on merchets, almost all produced in the late twentieth century, is usefully summarised in Müller, Miriam, ‘The function and evasion of marriage fines on a fourteenth-century English manor’, Continuity and Change 14 (1999), 169–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see note 2 at 186. For leyrwites, see Bennett, Judith M., ‘Writing fornication: medieval leyrwite and its historians’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th series, 13 (2003), 131–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Myntling Register, fos. 212v–218v. The untraced daughters were: Agatha daughter of Alexander Dally (1254–1255); Helen daughter of Emcine (1255–1256); Lucy daughter of Gilbert son of Elfric (1260–1261); Goda daughter of Simon Bryan (1262–1263); Cecily daughter of Richard son of Stephen (1265–1266); Hillary stepdaughter of Thomas of Norfolk (1265–1266); Maud daughter of Herbert son of Lewyn (1270–1271); Lucy daughter of Geoffrey Sywate (1276–1277); Margaret daughter of Agnes widow of Richard Smith (1279–1280); Margaret daughter of Alan Pynder (1280–1281).

35 The appendix shows the nominal links between inventory and survey. I treated the following cases as involving a single family group: 1 and 2; 14 and 15; 19 and 20; 21 and 22; 26, 27, and 28; 29 and 30; 33 and 34; 38, 39, and 40; 54 and 55. My explanations for the families with no links to the survey are: cases 1 and 2, no surname; case 4, three sons, all either dead or living away from Weston; case 5, one son in holy orders and the second living away from Weston; case 6, only one daughter; case 7, only daughters; case 9, only one daughter; case 10, only daughters; case 17, only daughters (note: a Margaret de Viridar held newlands); cases 26, 27, and 28, no explanation; case 43, two sons described as vagabonds; cases 54 and 55, no surname; case 56, no surname.

36 Spalding Priory allowed its serfs to sub-lease with proper permission (see case 38), and it also allowed its serfs to move among its manors. In 1259–1260 for example, a survey for Spalding included two Weston serfs – Gilbert Edrich and Nicholas son of Ranulf – who held land in Spalding but did services in Weston. BL Add Ms 35296, fo. 185.

37 About one in five fathers died without living heirs. See discussion in Smith, Richard M., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1250–1800’, in Smith, Richard M. ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 1–86Google Scholar, esp. 39–46.

38 Myntling Register, fo. 218.

39 Myntling Register, fo. 212v, and BL Add Ms 35296, fo. 215.

40 S.v. parvulus in The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, available via Logeion at http://logeion.uchicago.edu/parvulus [accessed 28 October 2018].

41 This paragraph relies on discussions in Hallam, Settlement and society, esp. 162–96 and 238 (for the tithe return); see also his ‘The agrarian economy of medieval Lincolnshire before the Black Death’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 11 (1964), 163–9; and his sections on Lincolnshire in Hallam, H. E. ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, vol. 2: 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar. For a useful summary of the complex history of land management in the Lincolnshire siltlands, see Hall, David, The open fields of England (Oxford, 2014), 75–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 286–8. For non-agrarian resources, see especially Kowaleski, Maryanne, ‘Peasants and the sea in medieval England’, in Kowaleski, Maryanne, Langdon, John and Schofield, Phillipp R. eds., Peasants and lords in the medieval English economy: essays in honour of Bruce M. S. Campbell (Brepols, 2015), 353–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hallam, H. E., ‘Salt-making in the Lincolnshire fenland during the middle ages’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological Society new series, 8 (1961), 85–112Google Scholar.

42 For the most detailed calculations, see Kitsikopoulos, Harry, ‘Standards of living and capital formation in pre-plague England: a peasant budget model’, Economic History Review 53, 2 (2000), 237–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dyer, Christopher, Standards of living in the later Middle Ages: social change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), esp. 109–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bailey, Mark, ‘Peasant welfare in England, 1290–1348’, Economic History Review 51, 2 (1998), 223–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Arable acreage is only a rough measure, of course, because quality of land varied, as did land rents and land use, and because tenants’ access to non-agrarian resources varied.

43 Campbell, Bruce M. S., ‘The agrarian problem in the early fourteenth century’, Past & Present 188 (2005), 3–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Judith M. Bennett, ‘Women and poverty: girls on their own in England before 1348’, in Kowaleski, Langdon and Schofield eds., Peasants and lords, 299–323.

44 Kanzaka, Junichi, ‘Villein rents in thirteenth-century England: an analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–1280’, Economic History Review 55, 4 (2002), 593–618CrossRefGoogle Scholar reports that 50–60 per cent of tenants in the midlands were smallholders. For Spalding and Weston, see Hallam, ‘Agrarian economy before the Black Death’, 164 (table); for the breakdown by personal status, see Hallam, ‘Some thirteenth-century censuses’, 243.

45 Of 27 head-fathers, 21 held more than 15 acres and 17 of these held more than 25 acres. I counted only head-fathers explicitly listed as landholders in the survey (that is, I did not infer the holdings of deceased fathers from information about their heirs). Because the survey duplicates some acreage by reporting it once as a tenancy and then again as assarted land, I have not counted newlands. On this point, see Hallam, ‘Agrarian economy before the Black Death’, 164, n. 8.

46 Kowaleski, ‘Peasants and the sea’.

47 Serfs could not be ordained or even enter minor orders, but manumitted serfs were eligible. Swanson, R. N., Church and society in late medieval England (Oxford, 1989), 37–8Google Scholar, where Swanson also notes that priests required a minimal income of about 40 shillings a year.

48 Homans, G. C., English villagers of the thirteenth century (New York, 1941), 109–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides a still useful discussion of these processes.

49 Richard Smith assumed, without explanation, that all parvuli were under five years of age. Smith, ‘Hypothèses’, 121.

50 See case 45, which reports seven parvuli living at home. See n. 52 below for the reproductive circumstances (high infant mortality; long birth intervals) that suggest that the oldest of these parvuli much have been considerably more than 15 years of age.

51 Lewis, Mary, Shapland, Fiona and Watts, Rebecca, ‘On the threshold of adulthood: a new approach for the use of maturation indicators to assess puberty in adolescents from medieval England’, American Journal of Human Biology 28, 1 (2016), 48–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. These analyses are broadly based on skeletal remains from c. 900 to c. 1550.

52 For infant and child mortality, see Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population history of England 1541–1871: a reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), 249Google Scholar (table 7.19); for birth intervals, see Wrigley, E. A., Population and history (New York, 1969), 92–4Google Scholar; and Howell, Cicely, Land, family and inheritance in transition: Kibworth Harcourt 1280–1700 (Cambridge, 1983), 204–05Google Scholar. In the absence of medieval data, we must rely here on data available after the beginning of parochial registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in 1538. Because the Weston inventory focuses on bloodline descendants of the head-father (see a stepchild ignored in case 11), the children in these families must have been born in sequence, even if born to different mothers.

53 See, particularly, the lifelong garciones discussed in Fox, H. S. A., ‘Exploitation of the landless by lords and tenants in early medieval England’, in Razi, Zvi and Smith, Richard eds., Medieval society and the manor court (Oxford, 1996), 518–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These garciones lived away from home, but the general principle is the same; until they married (if they ever did), they were called boys or lads.

54 Hallam, H. E., ‘Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire fenland, 1252–1478’, Population Studies 39, 1 (1985), 55–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, here 59.

55 See especially, Fox, ‘Exploitation'; Bennett, ‘Women and poverty’.

56 It is likely that the six men in category 5 held land in another lordship, and that the woman's husband did the same (see examples in endnote 36 above). Bastards were ipso facto free and would therefore have been ignored in the inventory. Smith's methods were different, but his findings are similar to mine – namely, that about 40 per cent of Weston's offspring were married. Smith, ‘Demographic developments’, 67–8.

57 Werner, Janelle, ‘Promiscuous priests and vicarage children: clerical sexuality and masculinity in late medieval England’, in Thibodeaux, Jennifer D. ed., Negotiating clerical identities: priests, monks and masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2010), 159–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Werner, Janelle, ‘Living in suspicion: priests and female servants in late medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 55, 4 (2016), 658–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 For the limited employment and landholding of rural singlewomen, see Bennett, ‘Women and poverty’, 301–07. The Weston survey of c. 1275 follows the pattern found elsewhere: of the 12 impartible villein tenures, one was held by a woman (identified as a wife, but likely a widow), and of 37 partible socage tenures, eight included women, but most were widowed co-tenants with sons. The Ringolf sisters were likely the only never-married female tenants of socage land.

59 Bennett, Judith M., A medieval life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295–1344 (Boston, 1999)Google Scholar.

60 For the general use of the term, see the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from English Sources, s.v. vagabundus available online via Logeion at http://logeion.uchicago.edu/vagabundus [accessed 28 October 2018]. For associations of the term with violence, especially the violence of unemployed soldiers, see Kaeuper, Richard W., War, justice, and public order: England and France in the later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988), 172–3Google Scholar. For associations with poverty and begging, see McIntosh, Marjorie, Controlling misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998), 89–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the specific use of the term on the Spalding estates, see Jones, E. D., ‘Some Spalding Priory vagabonds of the twelve-sixties’, Historical Research 73 (2000), 93–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Jones, ‘Vagabonds’, 100.

62 For the difficulties daughters faced in acquiring land, see Bennett, ‘Women and poverty’, 303–07.

63 Jones, ‘Vagabonds’, 100.

64 Page, Mark, ‘Town and countryside in medieval Ivinghoe’, Records of Buckinghamshire 51 (2011), 189–203Google Scholar.

65 Homans transcribes the Ely reference in English villagers, 432, n. 10; Bridbury, A. R., ‘The Black Death’, Economic History Review 26, 4 (1973), 577–92CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, here 590.

66 Bennett, ‘Women and poverty’, 311–16.

67 Ibid., 302.

68 For the later merchets of at-home daughters in 1268–1269, see cases 3, 14 with 15, 16, 22, 25, 31 (2), 33, 36, 40, 44, 45 (2), 46, 47, 52 (2); for the merchet of the one daughter who lived away in 1268–1269, see case 19. As noted above, merchets fell unevenly on serfs, with well-off daughters more liable for the fine; the daughters traced here came from both socage and villein households.

69 Jones misreads this leyrwite in ‘Vagabonds’, 103. The original is on fo. 218 of the Myntling Register.

70 British Library, Add Ms. 35296, fos. 221v–223v.

71 Bennett and Whittick together transcribed and translated the text; Bennett took responsibility for commentaries, categorisations, and links.

72 John the Almoner was prior from 1253 to 1274. ‘Neifs’ is a later change, probably replacing ‘serfs’, which was used in both the running head and the volume's calendar (fo. 4v).

73 We have found two exceptions to this ordering: two women whose merchets were paid before 1269 are reported as not married in the inventory. The two cases occur in adjacent fines in the Myntling Register: merchets paid in 1261–1262 for Hillary daughter of Herbert son of Betty (case 21) and Wulvine daughter of Elfric (case 49). Perhaps Hillary and Wulvine did not marry, despite their merchets, or perhaps Myntling made an error when he copied these fines.

74 E. D. Jones silently linked this Margaret to Emcine, the vagabond reported in the inventory; ‘Some Spalding vagabonds’, 102.