ABSTRACT
Rare though it is for twentieth-century feminists and medieval theorists to agree, on the central role of the familial household in creating, reproducing and epitomizing patriarchy, both parties unite. Feminists from Marxists to post-Jungian psychoanalysts argue that household structures and heterosexual marriages are crucial producers both of community gender order, and individual gender identities.1 Medieval family theorists, on the other hand, viewing patriarchy as both natural and desirable, portrayed the well-ruled family (including servants) as the metonym and guarantee of good order in the individual, society and universe.2 Like Aristotle, to whom many were apparently distantly indebted, these writers thought the household comprised two analogous sets of relationships – the husband to the wife and children, and the master to the servants. The ideal household community could include only one married couple, the heads of the family. All subordinate household members should be celibate, and their identity defined by their relationship to the household head, rather than to any other person, in or outside the co-resident group. The familial household formed one stage of an imagined hierarchy of political organizations that reached through households, to local communities, civic governments (generally staffed by male household heads), kingdoms, and ultimately the universe. Throughout this hierarchy of quasi-political groupings, the principle of governance of a unit by its male head was consistent and central. The early fifteenth-century author of Dives and Pauper summed it up:
Within such a system, servant marriages had the power to reconfigure drastically the identities of individuals within the household, and the authority structures of the domestic community. Yet granted this, it is odd that comparatively little research has examined the extent to which the ideal was actually embodied in late-medieval households or, conversely, destabilized by servant marriages. The orthodox assumption in late-medieval English historiography for the last 40 years has been that English pre-modern household formation and demography conformed to Hajnal’s model of the North-West European marriage pattern: high age at marriage for both women and men, neo-locality (that is, the married couple setting up a new household together), and – crucially – servanthood as a life-cycle stage that strictly preceded marriage.4 Successive writers repeat the mantra. ‘Both service and apprenticeship were usually incompatible with marriage’; ‘[s]ervice in husbandry … was not an adult occupation, but … a stage in the progression from child living with parents to married adult’; ‘marriage and servanthood were ordinarily regarded as incompatible in the later middle ages’; ‘[l]iving … as a servant … was an experience shared by many young women and probably most young men before the time of their marriage in later medieval and early modern England’.5 Though some aspects of the theory of lifecycle service have been (mildly) criticized, the historiographical identity of the servant as single remains almost unchallenged.6 Such unanimity, with its disquieting echo of medieval prescriptive texts, has perhaps discouraged writers from attempting to quantify or examine the phenomenon of servant marriage in the later Middle Ages. Certainly such analysis is almost entirely absent from the extensive literature on both servanthood and marriage in late-medieval England.7
