A MEDIEVAL HOUSEWIFE

He is upheld by the hope of his wife’s care…to have his shoes removed before a good fire, his feet washed and to have fresh shoes and stockings, to be given good food and drink, to be well served and well looked after, well bedded in white sheets…well covered with good furs, and assuaged with other joys and amusements…concerning which I am silent; and on the next day fresh shirts and garments. (The Goodman of Paris)

At daybreak cathedral bells sound the first note in a clangorous dialogue that keeps time all day for the citizens of Troyes. The cathedral, as the bishop’s church, has the right to speak first—before the count’s chapel or Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains — a precedence conceded to Bishop Hervée after an acrimonious dispute. Troyes has so many bells that a verse runs:

Where are you from? I’m from Troyes. What do you do there? We ring.

The bells do not ring the hours, but at three-hour intervals,1 marking the offices of the Church. People do not care exactly what time it is; they want to know how much daylight is left. The bells are their only timekeepers. Monasteries, churches, and public buildings may have sundials or clepsydras (water clocks). The weight-driven clock has yet to be invented.

The dawn bells—“Prime”—launch the day’s activity. The men of the guard go off duty as thieves slink to their cellars and honest men begin work. Blacksmiths and butchers are among the first. Shutters rattle and shops open. Cows, sheep, and pigs, mooing and squealing their way out of stable yards to pastures outside the walls, meet sleepy maidservants going to the wells with buckets and basins.

In the tall houses, people crawl out of bed, grope for their underclothes beneath the pillow and their outer garments on the perch, and splash their faces and hands with cold water. An honest housewife completes her morning grooming by combing and plaiting her hair. She has heard more than one sermon censuring women who indulge in cosmetics. The preachers like to remind their lady parishioners that wigs are made of the hair of persons who are now likely to be found in hell or purgatory, and that “Jesus Christ and his blessed mother, of royal blood though they were, never thought of wearing” the belts of silk, gold, and silver that are fashionable among wealthy women. The bandeaux which some ladies employ to bind their bosoms are also frowned on; in the next world, the preachers say, these will be transformed into bands of fire.

The feminine ideal is a slender figure, blond hair, and fair skin—“white as snow on ice,” says a poet. To achieve this ideal some women use ointments that are guaranteed to lighten complexions, but sometimes take the skin off along with the pigment.

One of the housewife’s first chores in the morning is shopping for food, which must be done daily. In Troyes most of the food purveyors are clustered in the narrow streets that surround St.-Jean—the Rue du Domino, the Rue des Croisettes (Little Crosses), the Cour de la Rencontre (Meeting Court). Many street names designate the trade practiced there—the Rue de la Corderie (Ropemakers), Rue de la Grande Tannerie and Rue de la Petite Tannerie, Rue de l’Orfàvrerie (Goldsmiths), Rue de l’Epicerie (Grocers). The Rue du Temple runs past the commandery of the Knights Templar.

Signs furnish a colorful punctuation to the rows of wooden houses—a bush for the vintner, three gilded pills for the apothecary, a white arm with stripes of red for the surgeon-barber, a unicorn for the goldsmith, a horse’s head for the harness maker.

Shoppers must watch their step in the streets, which are full of unpleasant surprises. In the butchers’ quarter slaughtering is performed on the spot, and blood dries in the sun amid piles of offal and swarms of flies. Outside the poulterers’ shops geese, tied to the aprons of the stalls, honk and gabble. Chickens and ducks, their legs trussed, flounder on the ground, along with rabbits and hares.

The housewives pinching the fowl carry in their purses three kinds of coins. Two are of copper—oboles and half-oboles, the small change of the Middle Ages. The only coin of value is the silver penny, or denier. A fat capon costs six deniers,an ordinary chicken four, a rabbit five, a large hare twelve.

Near the butchers’ and poulterers’ stalls are other food speciality shops. A pastry shop offers wafers at three deniers a pound. The spice-grocer displays a variety of wares. Vinegar comes in big jars at from two to five deniers. Most edible oils cost seven to nine deniers, although olive oil is double that price. Salt is cheap (five pounds for two deniers), pepper dear (four deniers an ounce), sugar even dearer. Even honey is expensive. Sweeteners appear on few medieval tables.

At the bakery, where an apprentice may be seen removing loaves from the oven with a long-handled wooden shovel, the prices of the different loaves are legally fixed. So are the weights, with variations permitted from year to year depending on the wheat crop. Bread is rather expensive this year. Some bakers cheat on quality or weight, and for this reason each baker must mark his bread with his own seal. A detected cheater ends up in the pillory with one of his fraudulent loaves hung around his neck.

The housewife is always on the lookout for poor quality or doubtful quantity—watered wine, milk or oil, bread with too much yeast, blown-out meat, stale fish reddened with pig’s blood, cheese made to look richer by soaking it in broth. Dishonest tradesmen are the butt of numerous stories. A favorite: A man asked the sausage butcher for a discount because he had been a faithful customer for seven years. “Seven years!” exclaimed the butcher. “And you’re still alive?”

Besides the food shops, there are the peddlers. About terce (nine o’clock) their cries augment the din of the streets. They sell fish, chicken, fresh and salt meat, garlic, honey, onions, fruit, eggs, leeks, and pasties filled with fruit, chopped ham, chicken or eel, seasoned with pepper, soft cheese and egg. “Good Champagne cheese! Good cheese of Brie!” cry the street vendors in Paris, and probably in Troyes as well. Wine and milk are also peddled in the street.

Marketing is only the first step in the preparation of food. All cooking is done over the open fire; there are no ovens in private houses. Food must be prepared and mixed by hand. Utensils are of iron, copper, pewter, earthenware—no steel or glass. There are no paper or paper products, no chocolate, coffee, tea, potatoes, rice, spaghetti, noodles, tomatoes, squash, corn, baking powder, baking soda, or gelatin. Citrus fruit is a rare delicacy.

Techniques for preserving food are limited. Fish are kept live or in pickling tanks, or salted and smoked; meat may be salted; winter vegetables can be stored in a cool cellar; some fruits, vegetables, and herbs are dried in the sun.
The dinner hour depends on the season and the trade of the household; one may dine as early as ten. Kitchen preparations begin early. Servants clean, mince, blanch, parboil, crush herbs in the mortar, fry and grill meat. To thicken sauces, bread crumbs ground with the pestle are used instead of flour. Recipes are characterized by a staggering complexity, except for roasts, which are turned on a spit over the fire.

Vegetables must be blanched, rinsed and cooked for long periods in several changes of water; the mortar and strainer are in constant use; the lists of ingredients are endless. Menus in a prosperous household consist of a series of broths or brewets, thick soups, stews, roasts and fish dishes, followed by savories, fruit or pastries, spiced wine, and wafers. At feasts the last course is preceded by glazed and decorated entremets (eaten “between courses”). These are no trifles, but boars’ heads, or swans roasted in their feathers, carried around on platters for all to admire.

Many tasks besides those of the kitchen occupy the housewife and her servants, of which even modest households have a few. City women in any case are better off than the peasant wives of the countryside, who must spin their own thread with the distaff and make their own cloth.

Among the daily tasks are making the beds, accomplished with the aid of a long stick to reach across the vast breadth of the master’s bed. Covers and cushions must be shaken out and chamber pots emptied. Servants make up the kitchen fire in the morning, fill the water vat and the big iron kettle in the kitchen, sweep out the entrance and the hall, and occasionally lay fresh rushes.

There are laundresses in Troyes, but most households do their own laundry. From time to time, shirts, tablecloths, and bed linen are put in a wooden trough and soaked in a mixture of wood ashes and caustic soda, then pounded, rinsed and dried in the sun. Soft soap is also used, and is made at home by boiling caustic soda with animal fat. A much better hard soap is made in Spain from olive oil, but is too expensive for everyday use.

Furs and woolen clothes are periodically beaten, shaken, and scrutinized. A special cleaning fluid for furs and wool is made of wine, lye, fuller’s earth (hydrous silicate of ammonia), and verjuice (pressed from green grapes). Grease stains are soaked in warm wine, or rubbed with fuller’s earth, or with chicken feathers rinsed in hot water. Faded colors can be restored with a sponge soaked in diluted lye or verjuice. Furs hardened from dampness are sprinkled with wine and flour and allowed to dry, then rubbed back to their original softness.

Both city and country women cultivate gardens, growing lettuce, sorrel, shallots, beets, scallions, and herbs. The herbs serve medicinal as well as cooking purposes—sage, parsley, fennel, dittany, basil, hyssop, rue, savory, coriander, mint, marjoram, mallow, agrimony, nightshade, borage. Flowers are planted indiscriminately with vegetables and herbs, and their blossoms are often used in cooking. Petals of lilies, lavender, peonies, and marigolds decorate stews; violets are minced with onions and lettuce as a salad, or cooked in broth; roses and primroses are stewed for dessert. Currant and raspberry bushes, pear, apple and medlar trees, and grapevines are also city garden favorites.

In the larger cities, garden space has been crowded out by housing. Now cities like Paris are clearing slum areas for use as city parks, like the Pré aux Clercs and the garden that Louis IX has created on one of the islands in the Seine.

Crusades and pilgrimages have introduced new plants, such as the oleander and the pomegranate.
Legend will claim that St.-Louis brought the ranunculus to France from the Holy Land, and Thibaut the Songwriter the red rose of Provins, the town’s emblem—although the rose that Thibaut brought was probably the pink Rose of Damascus, unusual in the Middle Ages in that it flowered more than once a season. Edmund of Lancaster, after marrying the widow of Thibaut’s nephew, will adopt the rose of Provins as the emblem of his own house, so that the red rose of Lancaster, ex-Provins, will eventually help provide a romantic name for the bloody English dynastic war.

Monasteries, too, make their contributions to gardening, perpetuating strains of fruits and vegetables that might otherwise have been lost, or spreading new varieties and horticultural information when the monks go on pilgrimages.

To be a woman in the thirteenth century is much like being a woman in any age. Women are somewhat oppressed and exploited, as always, but as in any age, social status is the really important thing, and a burgher’s wife is no serf. She is a person of dignity and worth, important in her family and respected in the community.

Unmarried women can own property, and in the absence of male heirs they can also inherit. Women of all classes have rights in property by law and custom. Women can sue and be sued, make wills, make contracts, even plead their own cases in court. Women have been known to appear as their husbands’ attorneys. A “Portia” character is the heroine of a contemporary romance, The Hard Creditor.

Well-to-do women know how to read and write and figure; some know a little Latin, or boast such ladylike accomplishments as embroidering and playing the lute. Girls receive instruction from private teachers, or board at convents. The convent of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains has a school for girls dating back to the sixth century. Universities are closed to women, but they are equally closed to men except those who are being trained for the clergy, law, or medicine. Among the landed gentry, women are better educated than men. In the romance Galeran a boy and girl brought up together are given typically different schooling—the girl learning to embroider, read, write, speak Latin, play the harp, and sing; the boy, to hawk, hunt, shoot, ride, and play chess.

Women work outside the home at an astonishing variety of crafts and professions. They may be teachers, midwives, laundresses, lacemakers, seamstresses, and even members of normally male trades and occupations—weavers, fullers, barbers, carpenters, saddlers, tilers, and many others. Wives commonly work at their husbands’ crafts, and when a man dies his widow carries on the trade. Daughters not infrequently learn their father’s craft along with their brothers. In the countryside girls hire out as farm workers. The lady of the manor takes charge of the estate while her husband is off to war, Crusade, or pilgrimage, and wives run businesses while their husbands are away.

Women do suffer from an inequity in respect to wages, which are lower than men’s for the same work. An English treatise on husbandry says, “If this is a manor where there is no dairy, it is always good to have a woman there at much less cost than a man.”

Politically, women have no voice. They do not sit on the Town Council or in the courts, or serve as provosts or officials. Basically, this is because they do not bear arms. Yet women play political roles, often with distinction—Empress Matilda of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Blanche of France, Countess Jeanne of Flanders, Blanche of Champagne, and many more. Countess Marie, wife of Henry the Generous, was asked to arbitrate claims between the churches of St.-Etienne and St.-Loup, and with her brother-in-law, William of the White Hands, archbishop of Reims, to decide important cases, including the seigneury of Vertus. In war, or at least sieges, women often play the heroine.

Women occupy positions of power and influence in the Church. The abbess of a convent such as Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains is invested with important executive responsibilities. Usually such posts are accorded to ladies of high rank, like Alix de Villehardouin, daughter of the marshal of Champagne. Abbesses are not afraid to assert their rights. A few years hence an abbess of Notre-Dame, Odette de Pougy, will defy the Pope’s excommunication and lead a party of armed men to defend what she regards as the rights of her abbey. This establishment owes its extraordinary prestige to its ancient origins, which are believed to date from the third century. The abbess actually enjoys rights over the bishop of Troyes. When a new bishop is installed, he must lead a procession to the abbey, mounted on a palfrey that is handed over, saddle included, to the abbess’s stable. Inside the convent, the bishop kneels and receives cross, mitre, and prayer book from the abbess’s hands. He recites an oath: “I…bishop of Troyes, swear to observe the rights, franchises, liberties, and privileges of this convent of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains, with the help of God and his holy saints.” The bishop spends the night in the convent and is given as a gift the bed in which he has slept, with all its furnishings. Only the next day does his installation as bishop take place in the cathedral.

Women achieve distinction outside the cloister, too. Marie de France is the most gifted woman poet of the Middle Ages, and “wise Héloise” the most noteworthy bluestocking, but there are many more. The contemporary scholar Albert the Great, debating whether the Virgin Mary knew the seven liberal arts, resolves the question affirmatively.

The cult of Mary serves to elevate the image of women and to counterbalance the misogyny of ascetic preachers who bestow such epithets as “man’s confounder,” “mad beast,” “stinking rose,” “sad paradise,” “sweet venom,” “luscious sin,” and “bitter sweet,” while lingering over the attractions of the temptresses. The chivalric ideal also glorifies women. The Church recognizes the wife to be subject to her husband, as Paul recommended, but as his companion, not as mere mistress or servant. Married people are expected to treat each other with respect, and many husbands and wives never call each other anything but Sir and Madam.

Wife-beating is common in an age when corporal punishment is the norm. But wives do not necessarily get the worst of it. A contemporary observer remarks that men rarely have the mastery of their wives, that nearly everywhere women dominate their husbands.

One preacher complains that formerly wives were faithful to their husbands and peaceful as ewe lambs; now they are lionesses. Another tells the story of a storm at sea, when the sailors wished to throw into the sea anything that might overload the ship, and a certain husband handed over his wife, saying that there was no object of such intolerable weight. The expression “wearing the pants in the family” is already current, and henpecked husbands are a favorite theme of the fabliaux.

 Perhaps the most important point to note about the medieval housewife, in contrast to women of earlier times, is that she has a purse. She goes shopping, she gives alms, she pays fees, she hires labor; she may, if the occasion arises, buy privileges and pay bribes.

She may do many other things with her money. Women make large gifts of land, money, and chattels to church institutions; found convents, monasteries, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; buy benefices for their sons and places in convents for their daughters; engage in trading operations. They are denounced by priests for usury, pawnbroking, and price manipulations, and for their reckless expenditures for luxury goods. They may travel extensively, sometimes as far as the Holy Land.

A woman of means is always a person to reckon with.

Daughters of burghers, like daughters of knights, learn definite rules of conduct. A poet, Robert of Blois, has codified the behavior of women of the gentle class:

En route to church or elsewhere, a lady must walk straight and not trot or run, or idle either. She must salute even the poor.

She must let no one touch her on the breast except her husband. For that reason, she must not let anyone put a pin or a brooch on her bosom.

No one should kiss her on the mouth except her husband. If she disobeys this injunction, neither loyalty, faith nor noble birth will avert the consequences.

Women are criticized for the way they look at people, like a sparrowhawk ready to pounce on a swallow. Take care: glances are messengers of love; men are prompt to deceive themselves by them.

If a man courts a lady, she must not boast of it. It is base to boast, and besides, if she takes a fancy later to love this person, the secret will be more difficult to keep.

A lady shuns the fashionable décolletage, a sign of shamelessness.

A lady does not accept gifts. For gifts which are given you in secret cost dear; one buys them with one’s honor. There are, however, honest gifts which it is proper to thank people for.
Above all, a lady does not scold. Anger and high words are enough to distinguish a low woman from a lady. The man who injures you shames himself and not you; if it is a woman who scolds you, you will break her heart by refusing to answer her.

Women must not swear, drink too much or eat too much.

The lady who, when a great lord salutes her, remains silent with bowed head is badly brought up. A lady removes her hood before those whom she would honor. One may only remain with head bent when one has something to hide — if one has a yellow complexion, or is ugly. If you have an unattractive smile, however, hide it with your hand.
Ladies with pale complexions should dine early. Good wine colors the face. If your breath is bad, hold it in church when you receive the blessing.

Especially in church one must watch one’s countenance, for one is in the public eye, which notes evil and good. One must kneel courteously, pray and not laugh or talk too much.

Rise at the moment of the Scripture, cross yourself at beginning and end. At the offering, hold yourself straight. Rise also, hands joined, at the elevation, then pray on your knees for all Christians. If you are ill or pregnant, you may read your psalter seated.

If you have a good voice, sing boldly. In the company of people who ask you, and by yourself for your own pleasure, sing; but do not abuse their patience, so that people will say, as they sometimes do, “Good singers are often a bore.”

Cut your fingernails frequently, down to the quick, for cleanliness’ sake. Cleanliness is better than beauty.

In passing other people’s houses, refrain from glancing inside. To enter without knocking is indiscreet.

One must know how to eat—not to talk or laugh too much at table, not to pick out the best pieces, not to eat too much as a guest, not to criticize the food, to wipe one’s mouth but not one’s nose on the cloth.

By Joseph and Frances Gies in "Life in a Medieval City", Harper Collins, New York, 1981, excerpts p.27-34. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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