ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the medieval peasant couples and their children in primarily nuclear families surrounded by complex networks of social support. The family structure was a fundamentally nurturing one, that nurture being necessary for the continued success of the household economy and family tenure on the land. Moreover, that structure endured throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in spite of the demographic losses and economic disruptions brought on by famine and plague. Medieval peasants could leave us no written descriptions, either tender or horrific, of the deathbed scenes of loved ones in the time of the Black Death. Death from the plague, as unreal and heretofore unknown as it was in the first wave of the epidemic, was a natural death, not a death that met the legal definition of a death other than a rightful death that would have elevated the event to legal notice as a homicide or misadventure.
