The Great Household in Late Medieval England by C. M. Woolgar (review)

REVIEWS C. M. Woolgar. The Great Household in Late Medieval England. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 254. $40.00. Woolgar’s is the most recent, and the most comprehensive, of several books in the last several years to treat the English household as a local, and locally influential, institution. Prominent historians were still treating the household largely as a transnational, transcultural phenomenon even as recently as 1985, when David Herlihy’s book on medieval households was published. But Woolgar’s offers a more important contribution than other books precisely because he has attempted to write a history both of local differences and of generic similarities. Virtually no one since David Starkey in a groundbreaking 1981 article (‘‘The Age of the Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts,’’ in Stephen Medcalf, ed., The Later Middle Ages [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981]) or Kate Mertes in her 1988 book (The English Noble Household 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988] (a book also based on household accounts, and which overlaps with this one) has attempted to argue for the centrality of the household in the cultural imaginary of the later English Middle Ages. As far as I know, the only English common noun that can also be used adverbially is the word ‘‘home.’’ The word designates, that is, both an object and a function, a dwelling and a mode of being. It lies at the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology, Aristotle’s vision of political action , and Freud’s definition of worlds familiar and unfamiliar. The functionality of the house in the Middle Ages, its nature as a ‘‘home’’—and, more importantly, its profound importance for the social imaginary— has sometimes been lost in contemporary social histories, which tend to vacillate between two notions of the house as a structure: the physical space—the domus—and the sociological relationships of its inhabitants —the familia. With the exception of T. F. Tout’s masterful Chapters in Mediaeval Administrative History, now eighty years old, studies of the household have been shaped by classical anthropology’s concern with kinship structures, in a long tradition stretching from Malinowski’s study of the gens to the Strukturgeschichte of Hans Schulze. Woolgar has already produced one seminal work in the developing field of studies of the medieval household, his 1992 two-volume edition of household accounts that covers roughly the same period as the book here (Household Accounts from Medieval England, 2 vols. [Oxford: British 601 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:40 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Academy, 1992]). This book is, in effect, an illustrated guide to the rich and fascinating trove of material in the earlier book, and to the wealth of information available in household records more generally. It provides material—anecdotal, archival, and archeological—that demonstrates the complexity of the household structure of the late Middle Ages, and illustrates a great deal of this material with a generous selection of photographs . It is anchored by records of seven households on the spectrum from the upper gentry (forty pounds of income a year from land, in the case of the Multons of Lincolnshire) to the aristocracy (the well-attested and peripatetic household of Joan de Valence and the Stafford dukes of Buckingham). The choice is dictated by the accidents of survival (records were often preserved by being entered as part of the muniments in cases sent to exchequer), which prevent us from ever reconstructing a truly representative sample. But more importantly, the disappearance of the bulk of household records makes it difficult to reconstruct representative practices and even the size and appearance of the typical household. Woolgar exercises some necessary ingenuity in reconstructing the flows of the household, and this necessity influences the object of inquiry itself. The three apparently unrelated topics of the first chapter , for instance, ‘‘Size, Membership, and Hospitality,’’ are inseparable because the evidence for all three stems from Woolgar’s extrapolation from the traces of the fercula, the portions registered in the daily accounting . What’s significant about this approach is that Woolgar is one of the few recent historians to have thought deeply about household records, and...