Women in the Middle Ages
Women held the positions of wife, mother, peasant, warrior, artisan, and nun, as well as some important leadership roles, such as abbess or queen regnant.
Whether or not they were powerful or stayed back to take care of their homes, they still played an important role in society whether they were saints, nobles, peasants, or nuns.
The Gregorian Reforms heavily restricted clerical marriage, which in turn affected a number of women who had previously held positions as priest's wives.
[10] Regarding the role of women in the Church, Pope Innocent III wrote in 1210: "No matter whether the most blessed Virgin Mary stands higher, and is also more illustrious, than all the apostles together, it was still not to her, but to them, that the Lord entrusted the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven".
[23] Peasants, slaves, maidservants, and generally lower-class women required the permission and consent of their master in order to marry, and if they did not have it, they were punished (see below in Law).
Conduct books from the period present an image of the role of elite women being to obey their spouse, guard their virtue, produce offspring, and to oversee the operation of the household.
By the High and Late Middle Ages there were numerous royal and noble women who assumed control of their husbands' domains in their absence, including defense and even bearing arms.
Particularly when acting as regents, elite women would assume the full feudal, economic, political and judicial powers of their husbands or young heirs.
Based on medical information developed in the Ancient Greek and Roman eras, these texts discussed ailments, disease, and possible treatments for women's health issues.
The Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, classed among medieval single women, wrote, in her 12th-century treatise Physica and Causae et Curae, about many issues concerning health.
[37] Both men and women participated in the medieval workforce and most workers were not paid by wages for their labour, but instead independently worked on their land and produced their own goods for consumption.
men ploughed, mowed, and threshed, and women gleaned, cleared weeds, bound sheaves, made hay, and collected wood.
These include: food preparation, laundry, sewing, brewing, getting water, starting fires, tending to children, collecting produce, and working with domestic animals.
[41] The division of gendered labour may be due to women's being at risk of danger, like being attacked, raped and losing their virginity, in doing work in the fields or outside of the home and village.
[41] Three main activities performed by peasant men and women were planting foods, keeping livestock, and making textiles, as depicted in Psalters from southern Germany and England.
[46] There is evidence that women performed not only housekeeping responsibilities like cooking and cleaning, but even other household activities like grinding, brewing, butchering, and spinning; and produced items like flour, ale, meat, cheese, and textile for direct consumption and for sale.
These inventions favoured commercial cloth-making and brewing dominated by male workers who had more time, wealth, and access to credit and political influence and who produced goods for sale instead of for direct consumption.
[48] After the Black Death killed a large part of the European population and led to severe labour shortages, women filled out the occupational gaps in the cloth-making and agricultural sectors.
[50] To illustrate, the late medieval poem Piers Plowman paints a pitiful picture of the life of the medieval peasant woman: Burdened with children and landlords' rent; What they can put aside from what they make spinning they spend on housing, Also on milk and meal to make porridge with To sate their children who cry out for food And they themselves also suffer much hunger, And woe in wintertime, and waking up nights To rise on the bedside to rock the cradle, Also to card and comb wool, to patch and to wash, To rub flax and reel yarn and to peel rushes That it is pity to describe or show in rhyme The woe of these women who live in huts;[51] The first group of peasant women consisted of free landholders.
Medieval peasants subsisted upon grain-heavy, protein-poor and iron-poor diets, eating breads of wheat, barley, and rye dipped in broth, and rarely enjoying nutritious supplements like cheese, eggs, and wine.
[68] Since the 800s, the invention of a more efficient type of plough—along with three-field replacing two-field crop rotation—allowed medieval peasants to improve their diets through planting, alongside wheat and rye in the fall, oats, barley, and legumes in the spring, including various protein-rich peas.
[67] As a result, Europeans of all classes consumed more proteins from meats than did people in any other part of the world during the same period—leading to population growth that almost outstripped resources at the onset of the devastating Black Death.
In northern France, Brittany, and the Holy Roman Empire, sons and daughters enjoyed partible inheritance: each child would receive an equal share regardless of sex (but Parisian parents could favour some children over others).
[43] Commercialization also contributed to the decline in female landownership as more women left the countryside to work for wages as servants or day labourers.
Other examples of women appearing in legal records come from court leet jurisdiction and borough ordinances in England where they are frequently cited for crimes involving labor, theft, and even occasionally for murder.
[76] There is evidence in the Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich from the 13th and 14th centuries that women were charged with breaking the assize of ale as well as keeping back money from the sale of corn.
[77] Women were also cited with buying corn outside of the city walls where taxes were not collected and either keeping it for their families or re-selling it and making an illegal profit.
From as early as the 4th century, the Church discouraged any practice that enlarged the family, like adoption, polygamy, taking concubines, divorce, and remarriage.
[83] After the Fall of Rome, manorialism also helped to weaken the ties of kinship and thus the power of clans; as early as the 9th century in Austrasia, families that worked on manors were small, consisting of parents and children and occasionally a grandparent.
[92] In rural South Slavic areas, a custom of women marrying men younger than themselves, in some cases only after the age of thirty, remained until the 19th century.
