Family and Social Structure in the Early Middle Ages

The family was the fundamental unit of early medieval society. It was also a much larger and more powerful institution than the modern nuclear family. The familia of a great lord might include not only his wife, children, and personal servants, but dozens or hundreds of dependents bound to him by ties of kinship, marriage, lordship, and service. The kindred was a corporate body: it held land in common, exacted compensation for injury to its members, bore collective responsibility for their offenses, and was the principal provider of welfare and protection in a society that had little other safety net. Marriage was an alliance between two kindreds, sealed by the transfer of property and the exchange of oaths; it could be dissolved, but only by procedures that protected the honor and the inheritance rights of both parties. The structure of the family and the structure of society were, in a real sense, the same thing.

This article surveys the family and social structure of the Early Middle Ages: the working of the kindred, the regulation of marriage, the position of women, the experience of childhood and old age, the social functions of the household, and the relationship between the family and the larger institutions of the Church, the manor, and the kingdom. For the social status of the two main groups - peasants and nobles - see the Who Were the Peasantry? and Who Were Medieval Nobles?. For the legal framework, see the Law and Governance. For the lordly households, see the Feudalism and Manorialism.

The kindred and the familia

The basic unit of early medieval society, after the individual, was the familia - the household. For a peasant, the household might consist of parents, children, perhaps an elderly grandparent, and one or two servants or slaves. For a great lord, the household was a much larger and more complex institution, including the family itself, the household retainers, the craftsmen, the bakers, the brewers, the smiths, the stable hands, the scribes, and the chaplains. The familia of a Carolingian royal palace or a great Anglo-Saxon monastery could number in the hundreds.

The familia was more than a domestic unit. It was an economic unit, in which the labor of the members was pooled and the resources were shared. It was a legal unit, in which the head of the household represented the family in court. It was a religious unit, in which the members worshipped together, attended mass together, and shared the sacraments. It was a social unit, in which the members were expected to support one another in feuds, in old age, in sickness, and in need. The breakdown of the familia - through the death of the head, the dispersal of the children, or the loss of the inheritance - was one of the worst calamities of early medieval life, and it is the unspoken tragedy behind many a saint’s life and many a chronicle entry.

The kindred, the sib in Old English or the parentela in Latin, was the larger kin-group to which a person belonged. The kindred was traced through both the father’s and the mother’s line, although the relative weight of the two varied by region and by period. In the Germanic world, the kindred was often traced primarily through the male line; in the Roman world, both lines were important. The kindred had collective rights and obligations. The male kindred could inherit land, exact compensation for injury, and bear responsibility for the offenses of its members. The female kindred had a special role in matters of inheritance, marriage, and the protection of widows and orphans. The kindred, in other words, was a kind of rudimentary welfare system, and it provided a framework of mutual aid that supplemented the more formal institutions of the Church and the state.

Marriage and the regulation of sex

Marriage in the Early Middle Ages was regulated by a combination of Roman law, Germanic custom, and Christian teaching. The Christian understanding, which gradually became the dominant one, held that marriage was a lifelong union of one man and one woman, sealed by the consent of the parties and the blessing of the Church. In practice, however, the rules were more flexible. The Germanic tradition allowed a wider range of marriage forms, including polygamy and concubinage, although these were increasingly constrained by the Church from the eighth century on. The Church’s own rules about what made a valid marriage were not fully developed until the twelfth century, and the situation in the early period was one of considerable variation.

A typical early medieval marriage was a much more public and political event than a modern wedding. It was an alliance between two families, sealed by the transfer of property - the bride’s dowry and the groom’s morning gift (the morgengabe in German, the do ut des of the marriage contract). The consent of the parents, especially the fathers, was required, and the marriage was usually celebrated with a substantial feast. The bride was typically in her mid-teens, the groom a few years older. The Church’s teaching, increasingly enforced by the Church courts, was that the consent of the two parties was the essential element, and that the absence of consent was grounds for the dissolution of the marriage.

The Church’s regulation of marriage was one of the most important ways in which the institution reshaped early medieval society. By forbidding marriage within certain degrees of kinship (a prohibition that was gradually extended through the eighth and ninth centuries to forbid marriage between persons related as closely as seventh cousins), the Church broke up the older kin-groups, weakened the role of the kindred, and built new alliances between unrelated families. By insisting on the lifelong and monogamous character of marriage, it gave a new stability to the household. By requiring the blessing of a priest, it incorporated the family into the sacramental life of the Church. For more, see the The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages.

The position of women

The position of women in early medieval society was a complex and shifting one. In law, women were generally under the protection of a male guardian: father, husband, brother, or lord. They could not ordinarily serve as witnesses in court (except in cases involving other women, or in certain local customs), and they could not normally hold public office (except in some monastic and aristocratic contexts). The legal wergeld of a woman was usually lower than that of a man of equivalent status, which meant that violence against a woman was, in a formal sense, less heavily punished than violence against a man.

In practice, however, the position of women was much more variable than these legal rules suggest. In the peasant household, the woman was a key economic actor, responsible for the dairy, the garden, the kitchen, the spinning and weaving, the care of the poultry, and the management of the household stores. In many regions, women worked in the fields alongside the men, especially at sowing and harvest time, and in the dairy and the textile workshop they were often the dominant partner. The “rule of thumb” sometimes invoked by modern commentators to justify wife-beating has no basis in the early medieval law codes; on the contrary, the codes and the Church councils repeatedly condemned the mistreatment of wives, and the protection of widows and orphans was a major theme of medieval charity and legislation.

In the aristocracy, women’s position was more varied. Some aristocratic women were pawns in dynastic politics, married off at an early age to seal alliances, and expected to produce heirs and manage households. Others were major political actors in their own right. Queen Balthild of the Franks, the Anglo-Saxon Lady Æthelflæd of Mercia, the Ottonian Empresses Theophanu and Adelheid, and the abbess Hilda of Whitby are among the most prominent examples, but the surviving records of wills, charters, and saints’ lives contain many others. The double monastery, in which an abbess presided over communities of both men and women, was a distinctive form of religious life that gave some women considerable authority. The Anglo-Saxon double monasteries of Whitby, Shaftesbury, Barking, and Wilton were among the most important religious institutions of their day.

The cult of the Virgin Mary grew steadily through the Early Middle Ages, and it had important consequences for the religious position of women. The Virgin was the model of the pious wife and mother; she was the queen of heaven, the intercessor for sinners, and (especially in the work of the Cistercians and other monastic orders of the twelfth century) the object of an increasingly intense devotion. The cult did not directly challenge the legal subordination of women, but it gave religious dignity to female nature and helped to soften some of the harsher patristic views of female weakness. For the religious life of women, see the Monasticism and the Benedictine Rule.

Childhood

Childhood in the Early Middle Ages was brief by modern standards. Most children were considered to have left the world of childhood by the age of six or seven, when they began to participate in the work of the household or the fields. Infant mortality was high - perhaps a quarter of all children died in their first year, and perhaps half did not survive to adulthood - and the death of children was a constant presence in early medieval life. The Church’s rite of baptism, normally performed within a few weeks of birth, was the central sacrament of the early years, and the survival of an unbaptized child who died was a serious concern.

The children of the aristocracy were often sent to other households to be raised, a practice that served to cement alliances between families. The sons of the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish nobles were often sent to the household of the king, where they served as pages, learned the arts of war and government, and made the connections that would serve them in later life. The daughters of the aristocracy were often sent to the great double monasteries, where they were educated, prepared for religious life or (more often) for marriage, and given a place in the elaborate social network of the great families.

Education in the early Middle Ages was limited. Most peasants were illiterate, and many minor nobles were as well. The ability to read and write Latin was the mark of the educated class, and it was concentrated in the clergy, the great monastic and cathedral schools, and the higher aristocracy. Charlemagne’s reforms of the eighth and ninth centuries attempted to raise the standard of clerical education, with significant results. The famous schools of Tours, Fulda, Reichenau, York, and Canterbury produced the leading scholars of the period. The education of women in the period was largely confined to the monasteries and to the upper aristocracy, but the survival of letters written by women, the wills and charters in which women acted as donors, and the lives of female saints like Hilda of Whitby, Lioba of Tauberburg, and the Anglo-Saxon noblewomen who corresponded with Boniface, show that female literacy was real, if limited.

Old age and death

Old age in the Early Middle Ages was a privilege. Most people who survived to sixty had lived a long life by the standards of the period, and the proportion of the population over the age of sixty was small. Those who did reach old age were often held in respect, both as repositories of the community’s memory and tradition and as the heads of the kin-group. Wills and testaments from the period show that older people often disposed of substantial property, and they were active donors to the Church and the monasteries.

Death was a constant presence. The great epidemics of the period - the Justinianic plague of 541 onward, the plagues of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, the local outbreaks of dysentery and other diseases - killed large numbers of people. Infant mortality, maternal mortality, and the dangers of childbirth took a heavy toll. The death of a parent, a spouse, a child, or a friend was a regular feature of early medieval life. The Church’s teaching on the afterlife, the resurrection of the body, and the communion of saints gave a religious framework to this constant loss. The cult of the saints, the veneration of relics, the prayers of the living for the dead, and the elaborate rites of burial were all ways of coping with the omnipresence of death.

The medieval doctrine of Purgatory, which was still in the process of being formed in the early Middle Ages, became increasingly important in the central and later Middle Ages. The doctrine held that the souls of the dead who had not yet attained the perfection required for heaven would suffer for a time in Purgatory, and that the prayers, alms, and masses of the living could shorten their suffering. The doctrine gave a powerful stimulus to the foundation of monasteries, the endowment of masses, and the giving of alms to the poor.

The social structure of the Early Middle Ages can be sketched in broad terms, with the caveat that local variation was enormous. At the top stood the king and the greater aristocracy: the great territorial magnates, the great bishops and abbots, the chief officials of the royal government. Below them stood the lesser aristocracy: the counts, the ministeriales, the household officials, the lesser nobles who served as judges, military commanders, and estate managers. Below them stood the mass of free peasants and the smaller landholders, who made up perhaps half the population in many regions. At the bottom stood the unfree: the slaves, the serfs, the dependents whose status had been fixed at birth and who could not easily change it.

The lines between these groups were not absolute. The free peasant might rise to become a lesser noble; the slave might be freed and become a free peasant; the lesser noble might marry into a great family and join the higher aristocracy. The mobility of the early Middle Ages was, however, more restricted than that of the High Middle Ages. The noble class was becoming hereditary in many regions by the tenth century, and the unfree class was increasingly being fixed in a hereditary status from which escape was difficult. The breakdown of the older mobility was one of the social changes that made the High Middle Ages so different from the world that preceded it. For the working of the system, see the Feudalism and Manorialism. For a broader context, see the Daily Life and Society in the Early Middle Ages.

The kindred and the familia

Marriage and the regulation of sex

The position of women

Childhood

Old age and death

Social structure: a sketch

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