Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England: Growing up in the Village by Miriam Müller (review)

For medieval scholars, Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (1960) cast a long shadow from which they have only recently begun to emerge. The field's impassioned response to Ariès's bold claim that childhood as a concept did not exist in the Middle Ages has left the field on the defensive, shaped by Ariès's presentist concerns rather than engaged with questions that emerge from an analysis of the extant source material. Miriam Müller strives to break wholly with this model. Inspired by the sociology of childhood, she seeks to examine children—specifically orphans and underaged heirs—among medieval England's rural peasantry as active agents shaping the world in which they live. This is not an easy task, particularly because the manorial rolls that she employs as her source materials were written with other aims in mind. While she does not always accomplish her goal, this study offers valuable insight into the lives of people often hidden from history.

Among the elite, guardianship of an heir was a lucrative position, such that jostling for custody of wards resulted in separated families, abductions, coerced marriages, and intra-familial litigation. This aspect of the medieval family has been well studied (see Sue Sheridan Walker, Jeremy Goldberg, Gwen Seabourne). Yet this perspective does not prepare us to understand the incentives for guardianship among the peasantry. Quite frankly, there were none. Taking on an orphan meant assuming all the work and responsibility that they was too young to do themselves and paying for the "privilege" to do so. Before the Black Death, when peasants were land hungry, at the very least, guardianship presented itself as an opportunity. This was not true in the aftermath of the plague's outbreak, the book's chief period of study, when guardians had to be awarded tax breaks to take orphaned children into their homes. Nonetheless, both lords and communities worked together to shoulder the burden of protecting orphans and preparing them for adulthood.

In an era of high mortality rates, what preparations did parents make for their children's welfare in the event of an early demise? Müller examines inventories of chattels left to heirs as well as the nature of heriots paid in kind. As a result, not only is she able to see how parents ensured that their children were set to follow in their footsteps, but she also provides insight into the material culture of peasant living. In chapter 4, Müller digs deeper into the sources to uncover information about the ages and sexes of wards, as well as those who took on their guardianship. Her findings help her to dispute a number of popular misconceptions. Among others, Müller highlights that an heir's siblings were also well cared for. Indeed, with the Black Death raging around them, it was well understood that siblings were often heirs-in-waiting. The final chapter examines how guardians slowly prepared heirs to take on adult responsibilities, particularly when it comes to arranging marriages and buying marriage licenses, sending them into service or attending grammar school.

For those eager to learn more about peasant lifestyle in medieval England, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs is a wealth of information. Nonetheless, it has two serious flaws that must be acknowledged. First, this book is evidence that publishers are leaving far too much of the copy editing to authors who are overburdened with teaching obligations. It is rife with typos, run-on and/or incomplete sentences, random capitalization, inconsistency in the punctuation of abbreviations, confusion between hyphens and em-dashes, as well as subject-pronoun disagreements. In addition, there are multiple incomplete footnotes (71n95; 150n35; 188n26; 189n47). The egregiousness of the errors makes the book a disruptive read and a poor model of professional writing for an undergraduate audience. Second, the author's historiography is...