Katherine L. French, "Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Katherine L. French, "Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague"

Date: September 23, 2025
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Professor Katherine L. French

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Overview

In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Professor Katherine L. French about her book Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London. The discussion explores how the Black Death reshaped domestic life in London, specifically examining how consumption, material wealth, and household management evolved between 1350 and 1530. Through rich examples drawn from wills, inventories, and the archaeological record, French illuminates the transformation of everyday life and the shifting meanings of "stuff" in post-plague London. The episode delves into the interplay of gender, social change, piety, and trauma on the domestic sphere.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Scope of the Project

[02:23 - 06:50]

• Personal and Academic Motivation:

  • Katherine French’s interest was sparked by renovating a 200-year-old farmhouse and pondering how earlier inhabitants lived.

  • Her career shift to the University of Michigan provided resources to expand her initial focus into a broader social and economic investigation.

    "I was curious about how people had lived in houses in the Middle Ages. And so I started exploring just that question. How did you live in a medieval house?"
    — Prof. Katherine French (03:10)

• Timeframe Chosen:

  • The book examines post-Black Death London (1350–1530) for a focused look at medieval change, with a comparison to pre-plague life as context.

    "It's a book about 1350 to about 1530 ... If you're gonna ask how something changes with the plague, you have to look a little bit at the world beforehand."
    — Prof. Katherine French (05:39)

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2. Sources and Methodology

[07:25 - 12:57]

• Main Sources:

  • Last wills and testaments (thousands survived), chiefly from ecclesiastical courts.
  • Probate and bankruptcy inventories for supplemental insights.

• Sample and Data Collection:

  • French built a relational database, sampling extensively to track items, relationships, gender of testators/beneficiaries, and descriptions.

    "In the end, I read about 3,000 wills ... In the end, this may have been about 20 to 25% of all the wills that survive for London."
    — Prof. Katherine French (09:44)

• Challenges:

  • Wills are relatively systematic; inventories were processed more ad hoc.
  • Categorizing and cross-referencing took years and considerable trial and error.

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3. Shifts in Material Wealth and Its Significance

[13:23 - 18:02]

• Increase in Valuable Goods:

  • More possessions, especially movable goods, became important for wealth and inheritance—indicating economic and emotional value.

    “Movable goods become an increasingly important part of people's wealth, their estates ... possessions are becoming not only financially valuable, but emotionally valuable.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (13:43)

• Descriptive Bequests:

  • Wills start containing vivid personal details, showing attachment to specific objects (e.g., bequeathing a “ring that I bought with Elizabeth Goodwin”).

    “That's a way of beginning to see that possessions are becoming not only financially valuable, but emotionally valuable.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (14:52)

• Material Culture:

  • Households gained colorful wall hangings, decorated bedding, painted items—comfort and aesthetic value grew in importance.

    “They're adding things that will brighten up a room ... There's this sense of just making your room brighter and more cheerful.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (16:22)

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4. Legal and Behavioral Changes in Response to New Wealth

[19:35 - 23:41]

• More Frequent Wills:

  • With more possessions, more people began making wills, not just for legal purposes but possibly as a reaction to trauma and to secure the future for children.

    “I actually think more people are leaving wills because they have more stuff and it has value and they need to dispose of it.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (20:30)

• Impact of the Plague's Trauma:

  • Patterns in wills reflect anxiety over orphaned children and unclaimed property.
  • Detailed guardianship provisions increase, suggesting a response to mass mortality.

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5. Redistribution of Goods and Social Change

[23:41 - 27:11]

• Vacant Houses and Property:

  • After the plague, empty houses led to goods being redistributed, sometimes officially, sometimes through informal means.

    “In the wake of the plague ... there's just a world of empty houses ... I suspect that an awful lot of people did sort of go through houses and take stuff, especially people who had been poor.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (23:52)

• Rise in Comfort and Social Mobility:

  • Formerly poorer residents acquired "nicer stuff," with tangible improvements in life quality and comfort.

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6. Household Management and the Learning Curve of Material Abundance

[27:11 - 32:18]

• Managing More Stuff:

  • Initially, both men and women inherit goods equally. Over a century, gender patterns emerge in the types of possessions bequeathed.

    "A lot of stuff is given pretty equally to men and women ... around mid 15th century you begin to have some items shake out as being preferred to be given to women, or preferred to be given to men..."
    — Prof. Katherine French (28:25)

• Organization and Gender:

  • The rise in chests for storage; the necessity of organizing possessions creates new domestic practices.

    “That century of learning how to gender things, I began to think of as a century of learning how to live with more things.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (28:53)

• Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Sources:

  • Literature often prescribes female domesticity before it’s widely practiced; “learning to live with things” is gradual.

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7. Care Work and the Material Culture of Care

[32:43 - 38:53]

• Caring for Children and the House:

  • Wills and inventories reveal gendered objects for childbirth, healing, and nurturing—such as girdles with coral (for childbirth) and amber (for teething).

    “Women are leaving the majority of girdles and they are leaving the majority of their girdles to women ... you realize her daughter is young, she's probably of childbearing age. This girdle is going to be useful to her when she has children.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (34:25)

• Children’s Material World:

  • Archaeology shows toys and shoes for children appear in larger numbers post-plague; these are not in wills, indicating low value but high usage.

    “People want their children to have toys, but toys are also educational... We know that women are inheriting dishes more than men. We know that men are inheriting weapons more than women. And so this is a way of shaking out, you know, how are people responding to their children?”
    — Prof. Katherine French (36:18)

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8. Attitudes Toward Consumption and Social Class

[39:53 - 43:55]

• Positive Attitudes Among Commoners:

  • Increased material wealth is a source of pride and security for most Londoners. They value providing for their children.

    “This idea that medieval people didn't love their children, it's frankly nonsense ... Why wouldn't you want to be able to take care of your children?”
    — Prof. Katherine French (40:21)

• Elite Anxiety:

  • The ruling classes are concerned about “social climbing” and class emulation, uneasy with non-elites acquiring the trappings of wealth.

    “Elites are very unhappy about what they perceive to be social climbing ... But the merchant is using that wall hanging not only for comfort and for decoration, but he's also using it to make the aristocrat who is his customer comfortable in his house so that he can sell him more goods.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (41:44)

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9. Domestic Piety and the Growth of Religious Material Culture

[44:31 - 50:10]

• Religious Practices at Home:

  • The period saw increased private devotion and acquisition of religious objects for the household (prayer beads, images, shrines).

    “Certainly there is more material for religious practice in homes after the plague ... There might be a shrine in the bedroom ... that's a really common place to have religious objects.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (45:07, 46:10)

• Variety and Scale:

  • Wealthier households might have a dedicated domestic chapel, while others have miniature shrines or artifacts tailored to budget.

• Not a Direct Path to Reformation:

  • The flourishing of household piety is not equivalent to the rise of Protestantism; there are centuries of “orthodox” domestic religious customs.

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10. Current Research and Looking Forward

[50:10 - 52:27]

• Continuing the Study of Houses:

  • French is researching the history of one London house traced from 1321 through the Great Fire, focusing on its period as a lodging house, offering a window into women’s and working-class lives across centuries.

    “I'm writing a history of this house where the bulk of the book is about the time when it is a lodging house. A quarter of the tenants are women renting rooms on their own ... tracing...the changing stability and mobility precarity of the people who are living in this house.”
    — Prof. Katherine French (51:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the emotional value of goods:

  "Describing something as, you know, my best drinking cup with a lion's head in the bottom that my mother gave me adds information that's actually not legally necessary."
  — Prof. Katherine French (14:44)

• On legal anxiety post-plague:

  "There were empty houses and unclaimed objects ... people didn't want that to happen ... you needed to lock down your estate."
  — Prof. Katherine French (21:05)

• On the shift in domestic management:

  “A century of learning how to live with more things.”
  — Prof. Katherine French (28:53)

• On elite discomfort with social mobility:

  “Elites are very unhappy about what they perceive to be social climbing ... as they are dressing and eating above their station, they're probably also moving, walking, carrying themselves differently.”
  — Prof. Katherine French (41:16)

• On the resilience of London:

  “London’s government does not collapse, which is also quite remarkable. You know, lots of aldermen die, mayors die, livery men die, people who have institutional memory die, and new men come in and step in.”
  — Prof. Katherine French (24:02)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Book Overview – 01:24–04:43
• Sources and Methodology – 07:25–12:57
• How the Plague Changed Possessions – 13:23–18:02
• Growth in Wills and Legal Shifts – 19:35–23:41
• Redistribution and Social Change Post-Plague – 23:41–27:11
• Household Management and Gender – 27:11–32:18
• Material Culture of Care and Children – 32:43–38:53
• Attitudes to Consumption and Social Mobility – 39:53–43:55
• Domestic Piety and Material Religion – 44:31–50:10
• Current Research and Preview – 50:37–52:27

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Tone and Style

The conversation is accessible, engaging, and packed with vivid historical examples and storytelling. French’s explanations balance scholarly rigor with relatable analogies, and Dr. Melcher’s questions invite nuanced, personal reflections and clarifications.

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Final Thoughts

Professor French’s research provides a rare, detailed view of Londoners’ evolving domestic life after the Black Death, linking the abstract consequences of calamity to concrete shifts in daily life, family, care, and faith. Listeners come away with a much deeper understanding of medieval domesticity—not as static or grim, but dynamic and deeply human.

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End of summary.

Transcript

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[Professor Katherine French]

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[Professor Katherine French]

Welcome to.

[TJ Watt]

The New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Katherine French about her book titled Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2021, which takes us pretty far back in time to a very distinct, distinctive moment for, well, a whole bunch of places. The Black Death did not exactly discriminate. But we're going to be looking at this specifically in London, where we can get actually quite a detailed lens on what this actually meant for people, for their stuff, for their experience of living in the city, because it was a pretty big change. So what did that change actually mean in the immediate aftermath? And in the longer term too? I found this really fascinating to explore, especially through the lenses we're going to be discussing. So, Catherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.

[Professor Katherine French]

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you start us off perhaps by introducing yourself a bit and telling us why you decided to write this?

[Professor Katherine French]

Sure. So I am Katherine French. I'm the J. Frederick Hoffman professor of Medieval History at the University of Michigan. But I Did not always teach at the University of Michigan. For 17 years, I taught at one of the State University New York campuses in New Paltz, New York. And I was renovating a 200 year old farmhouse and I kept finding evidence of how people had lived in this house differently than I had lived in the house pretty much. I learned that pretty much everywhere I had a bookcase earlier, people had had beds. So a lot more people had lived in my tiny little house than were living there with me. And I was curious about how people had lived in houses in the Middle Ages. And so I started exploring just that question. How did you live in a medieval house? And then I got the job at the University of Michigan and I had more resources and a little bit more time to think about things. I wasn't teaching quite as heavy a load. And the project just grew into a larger question about the consequences of the plague. And I was particularly interested in the material consequences of the plague. That this is a time period when scholars have really debated what's the impact. And most of this conversation is economic. Did it ruin the economy? Did it advance the economy? It seems quite clear for England that those who survived were paid more. There's a definite labor shortage, so wages went up. People didn't have to spend as much money on food just to survive. And so with more money, what were they buying? So I was interested, I got very interested in that question. I also am a women's historian, and so I was particularly interested in questions around consumption and gender, which is another question that historians ask. How are things gendered? Do women buy and use things differently than men? What about objects? Do we associate them with men or women exclusively? Not at all. So I was interested in those kinds of questions.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a whole bunch of very interesting questions to investigate. And obviously, when we're talking about something with as big an impact as the plague, thinking about any of those consequences could range a lot in terms of scope. So can you tell us what time period you focus on in the book and why you decided on this range?

[Professor Katherine French]

So the bulk of the book looks at the world after the plague. So roughly 1350. And then I stop in 1530, 1540. That's a little late for a medievalist, but it allows you to go into the early part of the Tudor government's Tudor world. But it is really before enslavement and overseas expansion begin to seriously impact and change the economy. So I wasn't really interested and I'm not really qualified to start talking about that world. And so I wanted to stick pretty closely with the Middle Ages. My previous work has been on popular religion. And so the Reformation is an important stopping point for a lot of my other work. And I know that changes things materially as well. And so I wanted to sort of provide a bunch of questions going forward for other historians. But I knew that I was entering a world that worth many things had changed that I couldn't really quite look at consequences of the plague anymore. So that's why I end it in the sort of early to. Yeah, early 16th century. But if you're gonna ask how something changes with the plague, you have to look a little bit at the world beforehand. So I do have a first chapter which is about the world before the plague. That's a very different world. And it's also a very different world in terms of the sources. So it was very hard to make the comparison because I wasn't comparing like with like quite so easily. So the first chapter is arranged a little differently. The sources are a little different. My conclusions are, I think, a little bit more hesitant. But basically it's a book about 1350 to about 1530.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's a helpful range. And kind of knowing what the factors are in determining that is also really useful foundation. And I think that gives us kind of enough introduction to start to get into some of the really interesting content of this. And of course, the first question is, this is a really long time ago. People were not writing blogs about their experience. So we don't have sort of receipts of what they purchased in the same ways we do now. So what kinds of documents do we have that help us answer these questions you've raised? How many of them do we have? How can we work with them?

[Professor Katherine French]

So the bulk of my sources are last wills and testaments, and we actually have thousands of them that survive for before the Middle Ages. And they come from various jurisdictions, various courts, but they are, by and large, ecclesiastical courts. So wills are the majority of the sources that I use. I also use probate inventories. We don't have as many of those, but there are some. So I used as many as I could find. There are also inventories that get created because of bankruptcy procedures, so I use those as well. The assessors are doing inventory for different reasons. And so there are some differences that have to be accounted for. But basically my two sources are inventories and wills. And it wasn't that I was ignoring other sources. I really was. What kinds of sources talk about things? What kinds of sources are going to tell me what are in houses? So I began assembling a sample of wills. And it took me actually a long time to figure out the sample. And I was building a relational database to track all of the wills. And I think I made every single mistake you can make with the database before I was able to come up with both the sampling and the organization of the database. In the end, I read about 3,000 wills. I was sampling them in five year batches every 20 years because I was trying to see change over time. In the end, this may have been about 20 to 25% of all the wills that survive for London. It took me. I didn't start out knowing how many wills, and we still don't know really for sure. I also limited myself to wills that were just for London, not the Diocese of London. The Diocese of London is a slightly larger geographic region. And so I started read, reading them. And I needed to have, you know, I needed to know what was what the number I was dealing with, even if I didn't know how many will survived. And so I had one list that was all the wills that I read. And basically I had a yes or no. And I tracked who was the testator, where did they live, when was the will written. And then the question was, did they leave movable goods or not? And if they didn't, I was done with that will. If they did, then I entered it into a spreadsheet, this relational spreadsheet, where I categorized whether the testator was a male or female, what their occupation was, where did they live, did they have family members, did I have a sense of roughly how old the family was? This is really imprecise. If the testator says to my wife and the child that she is pregnant with, I knew it was a younger family. If they were leaving something to grandchildren, I knew it was an older family. But people don't say how old they are. And then I connected that will, I called it in my head the will sheet to another database that listed all of the movable goods that were in the will. I had various categories that I created so that I could track these goods in various ways. The kind of, the kind of object that what it was made out of, whether the testator said, where it was, who, who the beneficiary was to be, and if I knew what the relationship between the testator and the beneficiary, beneficiary were. So this whole creation of this database took me. If we can count all of the mistakes and the, the blind alleys I went up, it took me about five years I spent a lot of time in between trying to figure out if there were other sources I could look at for the inventories. I probably should have created a spreadsheet or a database for them. In the end, I just transcribed them all into a series of word documents, printed them off, and put them in various categories. Did I think that the person in the inventory lived in a large house or a small house? And then did they have rooms listed in the inventory or not? And then I just marked up the margins. Were there fireplaces? Did they have dishware, things like that? That was in the. In retrospect, I think a spreadsheet would have helped with that. I think I ended up duplicating a lot of effort because sometimes I couldn't read my handwriting. I couldn't remember if I done something or I had a new idea of how to do it. So the wills were this rather quote, unquote, scientific spreadsheet. But the inventories was a little bit more hit or miss in the end. I ended up one day with many piles on my living room floor as I was trying to categorize the inventories with sticky notes all over them in different colors as I was trying to sort them. Um, as I said, I think I duplicated a lot of effort.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I think many projects have that sort of part of the process. So thank you for taking us behind the scenes as you figured all of that out. Obviously there's a ton of information in what you've just described. So can you give us perhaps a sense of some of the things that you were able to analyze from it? For example, how much did the plague change? What kinds of possessions people saw as valuable?

[Professor Katherine French]

So it, over the long term, it does change things. One of the things when I was creating the will database is 50% of the wills in my sample, roughly, maybe it was like 48% precisely left material goods, movable goods, but that percentage changed. Increasingly, movable goods were added to wills. Now, for legal reasons, people were adding their material, their movable goods, but they're also doing this because they're trying to protect it as a source of wealth. So this change over time is that movable goods become an increasingly important part of people's wealth, their estates. And that's. That isn't necessarily the same thing as saying they become emotionally attached to these objects. But there's hints in wills that people are becoming emotionally attached. They begin to describe them. And some of these descriptions, again, have legal reasons. I want to make sure that my green hanging cloth is given to my nephew not the red hanging cloth. So. So there are legal reasons, but at the same time, testators are invariably members of the family. So people who would know these goods quite well. Most of my wills are left by men. Married women are not allowed to make wills at this time. And so the wills I have from women are by and large widows. So most of the test, most of the executors are wives. And so they would know what was in this house. So describing something as, you know, my best drinking cup with a lion's head in the bottom that my mother gave me adds information that's actually not legally necessary. And so that's a way of beginning to see that possessions are becoming not only financially valuable, but emotionally valuable. You begin to get descriptions like the. The ring that I bought with Elizabeth Goodwin, something like that. So again, a description that is really telling you a little story, and it's a story that's not immediately useful legally. The ring with the red stone might be legally useful to distinguish it from other rings, but that I bought with Elizabeth Goodwin or John Smith. We might not know who those people are, but the testator thought that was important to tell. And so you get these hints of stories also. The fact that they're just bequeathing them increasingly, not just in batches, but individually, also intimates that they are becoming valuable to people in ways that are not just financial. So in terms of the kinds of possessions that people have, they're adding color and comfort to their houses. They've got wall hangings, become a popular decorating item, and they may provide some insulation in a drafty house, but they're also decorated. They have Bible stories, they have stories from literature. They have just flowers and greenery. So they're adding things that will brighten up a room. They're adding bedding that has decorations on it, saints to protect you while you're sleeping, animals, because it might be a sort of a heraldic device or a play on a family's name, but it also might be just that, you know, they liked them. I remember one will in which the testator, he's got some young children and the quilts on their bed or the coverlets on their bed have lions on them. And it's sort of like Disney with the Lion King on little kids bedding. So I think that there's this sense of just making your room brighter and more cheerful. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Evglis. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks, and most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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[Professor Katherine French]

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[Professor Katherine French]

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] yeah, some of those details really are quite evocative even with such a distance over time for us today. So thank you for sharing some of those with us. I'm interested particularly in what you were noting though around kind of what information was or was not legally necessary in these sorts of documents. Was having these fancier sort of more possessions changing how Londoners behaved Legally, beyond just kind of adding extra information they didn't need to.

[Professor Katherine French]

Can you, can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, were, for example, more people making wills because maybe they didn't have a lot of possessions beforehand and now they do, or were they, how are they engaging with sort of legal apparatuses in a different way, or were there not in fact changes?

[Professor Katherine French]

So we do have more wills. The numbers of wills grows. Absolutely. And that is probably a change in behavior because we know the population is also smaller. But since we never know fully how many people there are, and we never know fully how many wills we've lost, it's hard to say exactly what's going on. But yes, definitely by the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, we have many more wills. The population though, at that point does begin to grow. So again, it's a little unclear how much of this is actual legal changes, but I actually think more people are leaving wills because they have more stuff and it has value and they need to dispose of it in one way or another. I also wonder, and there's really no proof for this, but I do wonder about this as a consequence of the trauma of the plague. Trauma is really hard to see in this world. The sources just don't lend themselves to seeing trauma. And so you're kind of trying to intuit this from the way that records are slightly changing. We know that with the plague that people began to, in their wills, delineate farther down who would take care of their children. So, you know, I'm going to leave this person as the guardian of my child. But if they die, then this person, if they die, then this person. And in the years around the plague, you really see really an uptick in the, just the lists of people who will become guardian of the children. And I wonder if the sort of knock on effect of all of this trauma is that people remember in this world of massive mortality, there were empty houses and unclaimed objects and that people didn't want that to happen. And that there was this just growing sense that you needed to lock down your estates again. You can't really see that in the documents, but there's this cumulative change in, in behavior which could be a legacy of this world that you want to lock down your, your estate, but you know that there are consequences of not locking down your estate. Your children aren't taken care of. Possessions that you've inherited from, from people who have died, that mattered to you. The memories that are encoded in those things need to be Carried forward. And so I wonder about that. But there are absolutely, definitely more wills surviving. And that does seem to be some sort of consequence of changing legal behavior. And certainly in a world where movable goods are holding a larger percentage of your wealth, you need to take care of that. And certainly more goods in your household, a larger percentage of your estate being movable goods is a consequence of the plague.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's really helpful to understand. But the piece I want to pick up from that is the empty houses with stuff in them. What happened to the stuff? Did everyone kind of just get nicer stuff as a result?

[Professor Katherine French]

Yes, actually, I think that's exactly what happens. So the thing that's really interesting is that in the wake of the plague, you know, those first few months as people are still frantically burying people, I imagine there's just a world of empty houses. I mean, some estimates put the mortality rate at London at 50%. And this happens over a really short period of time. I don't think we can really kind of imagine what that is like. At least I hope we can't imagine, because it seems pretty horrible. And London's government does not collapse, which is also quite remarkable. You know, lots of aldermen die, mayors die, livery men die, people who have institutional memory die, and new men come in and step in. Some of them are not very good, some of them are a little corrupt. But in general, the legal system survives. So there's not this extended period of squatting. People do find distant relatives who come in to take over property. I suspect that an awful lot of people did sort of go through houses and take stuff, especially people who had been poor. And here's an empty house, your neighbor was better off, you were a little jealous, you wanted their stuff. So I suspect there was a lot of that kind of stuff. We don't have evidence. The legal system is going to take a few months to pick up. There are legal records from the city of London. There's a tax that's imposed and the city complains. You know, a third of our houses are still empty. We really just don't have the people to. To pay this tax. So. So I suspect there were a lot of houses and. But the city is trying hard to keep, you know, keep squatters from. From staying too long, finding people to take over, or if they stay vacant enough, you know, doing some record searching to find out who the previous owners were. Many of the. Many of the properties would have been owned by institutions, monasteries, churches. And so then you just move them on to, you know, put them up for, for release or re resale. So it's hard to see those first few months. The sources aren't very good for that. And some of that is just the crisis of people. People have to learn how to keep the administration. You got to find people to fill in. It is a crisis. Although in some ways after the plague has moved on, it seems like it's a slow moving crisis. You just have not enough people to do all the work that's necessary.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that sense of kind of the timing between this sort of immediate first few days and week to then the first few months to then sort of what do those different shifts mean? What then about household management practices? If we've got these houses that were empty but now kind of the stuff has been sort of apportioned out in various ways. People have more stuff. What does that mean in terms of what people are doing within the house? I mean you presumably have to like, I mean you have to clean those new hangings that you've gotten. What does that look like?

[Professor Katherine French]

Right, so that is exactly, that is a really. I think the very interesting part of my research was that in the first hundred years people are trying to figure this out. There's, there's, it's not that women weren't in charge of housekeeping. I mean, you know, you, this is, this is sort of an expectation that goes probably back to, you know, the first, the first people who decided not to rove around hunting, I don't know, woolly mammoths and set up, you know, set up a permanent house and plant crops. So we probably have a sense that women had to, were expected to clean up after men. But, but there's different levels of housekeeping. There's the, I'm going to supervise and boss around a bunch of people and then there's the actual I'm going to get down and scrub the hearth or clean the shoes or wash the clothes. So in this first hundred years, what I was interested in is in thinking about not only where did stuff tend to get put in houses, but, but who makes those decisions. And I don't have records that say I'm going to tell you how my house is run. But what I did look is tracking what kinds of goods were both new to houses. So wall hangings were something that become a new possession. We see an increasing number of chairs and tables. So we don't see necessarily these are tables and chairs are not new, but the increased quantity of them is happening. And I got interested in and was tracking in my database who was inheriting this. And so the, the. Really, the thing that became the most interesting in the database was not so much who the beneficiary was in relation to the testator. I, I knew that sometimes, but not all the time, but really what sex was the beneficiary. And in the first hundred years after the plague, a lot of stuff is given pretty equally to men and women. And so what. What happens around mid 15th century is that you begin to have some items shake out as being preferred to be given to women, or preferred to be given to men, or still given equally to men and women. And so that, that century of learning how to gender things, I began to think of as a century of learning how to live with more things. And if you're learning how to live with more things, you have to learn a bunch of other things, that gendering items is sort of the most visible sign. So you have to learn how to qualify, quantify. I'm sorry, not quantify, but categorize things. Where do you put things? Do you. We, we see a rise in the number of chests that people have in their houses, but do you really want to put your greasy frying pan with your clothing? I mean, not if you have space. So beginning to look at how did people store things? When, when people leave wills, they sometimes say, oh, the chest that's in the front room and that has in it. But this is really where the inventories became the most useful is because the inventories, for actual legal reasons, needed to say, well, in the chest in the living room, we found all these objects, and in the chest in the bedroom, we found all these objects. And sometimes testators would mimic inventory procedures and would also say, oh, in the chest in my bedroom, you know, at the foot of my bed, you'll find six sheets. Those are going to go to whoever. So you begin to see both in the inventories and in the wills, how people are organizing their world. And so that becomes a way of trying to understand how behavior is changing, how houses are getting organized, and then getting at who's actually in charge. Required reading these documents, which are very descriptive with, with records or, or literary sources, which are very proscriptive, you know, people should do this, people should do that. And, and so reading those in tandem, looking at how objects became gendered female and looking at literary sources that said women should be doing this, you see that the prescriptive literature is saying women should be doing this. They should stay at home, they should take care of their families. They, they should, you know, run an organized house. Those records, those Literary sources are actually happening earlier than we're seeing the practice play out in the documents. And so, again, I think this is part of the learning process of how do you learn to live with more stuff?

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

This is really interesting to understand, and especially because this impacts so many aspects, not just of stuff, but also kind of how what one is kind of doing throughout the day and what sort of one's main responsibilities are. So obviously this includes kind of every aspect of life. But maybe we could talk about in a bit more detail what this meant for care work, including the caring and nurturing of children.

[Professor Katherine French]

Sure. So in the. So what I did is I began to think about household tasks. I was informed a lot by how anthropologists think about houses and household tasks. But caring is a large category, but it includes caring for children, feeding the members of your household. It includes educating, teaching, not necessarily formally, but teaching a kid how to tie their shoes or how to eat properly at a table. It includes medical care. The first line of healthcare is going to be someone in the household. And so if you look at the material culture that was left in wills and sometimes mentioned in inventories, we begin to see that some objects are described as for childbirth. We also know that in books or manuscripts called lapidaries, these are literary and scientific manuals. They go back to the Roman and Greek and Egyptian period. They tell us that coral is a good stone for healing, stemming blood flow, for. For moving any process along fast. So women use it in childbirth. This is actually the origins of birth, of our birthstones. So. So there are a world of, like, these medical and science scientific records or quasi scientific records that tell us how people are supposed to use objects that they might have in their houses. And, you know, I was seeing rings and belts and. And necklaces that were decorated with these valuable stones. So I knew that coral and amber and jet were all used in childbirth. And there were just enough clues in who women were leaving, what they called their girdles. You know, they would say, my girdle that is decorated with coral, I'm leaving to my daughter. And then, you know, you sort of look at the will holistically, and you realize her daughter is young, she's probably of childbearing age. This girdle is going to be useful to her when she has children. And when you track who is receiving, you know, coral girdles or amber girdles. Amber was a. Was a stone that was also thought to help with alleviate teething pain in babies. You realize that women are leaving the majority of girdles and they are leaving the majority of their girdles to women. They're also leaving beads. We think of them as rosary beads. The rosary is a cycle of prayers, and it's a cycle of prayers that's not really developed until the end of the 15th century. So prayer beads, just generically, prayer beads also have stones that were used in all of these processes. So reading medical literature against the objects that people were leaving and then looking at who they're leaving them to, you begin to see that there are particular items that work around childcare, that work around healing, and that women are in charge of them. Even men's wills will say things like, I'm leaving my wife's prayer beads to our daughter. So, and then if you actually look at the archaeology, which I did, you see that there are lots of little. Well, there are toys that are being created, and they appear in increasing numbers in the archaeological record at the same time that more stuff is being put into wills. And these, these toys are not valuable. They're not valuable enough to be listed in wills. But we're finding them or archaeologists are finding them in their excavations. And so people want their children to have toys, but toys are also educational. The toys could be also gendered. You know, little knights versus little dishes. We know that women are inheriting dishes more than men. We know that men are inheriting weapons more than than women. And so this is a way of shaking out, you know, how are people responding to their children? They have the wherewithal to buy them toys. This is a world that has a little bit of disposable income and wants their children to have these things and can afford to have these things. This stuff is, you know, really going to be very, very cheap. Shoes also become a really lovely example of caring for children. There's lots of shoes that survive in the archaeological record. And if you look at the shoes that survive, the smallest ones are about the size of children who are around two one and two. And this is when children start walking. And so you want them to have shoes to protect their feet, the children's shoes, that the styles don't match. The grownups that children's shoes continue to have laces in the center, which are much easier for parents to tie. You've got a wiggling child who doesn't want to sit still and have their shoes tied. But at the same time, grownups shoes have laces on the side. But that's going to be harder for a wiggling child to tie up on. So you can see in this way of working with both the written sources and the material left in archaeology, how caring for children becomes associated with women. And this is probably not new, but the ways they get to care for children has now got a lot more material culture attached to it.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

These are some great examples that really, really, I think drive this point home. All sorts of things about kind of what a difference it makes and therefore what we can really clearly see, right? Are there little kids shoes before. And that's quite distinct in these kinds of records. And it makes it seem, especially in the examples you've just been telling us about, like this increase in material wealth was considered a good thing. Like, I'm glad to be able to leave this to my daughter. It will help her in pregnancy. Was it always seen as a good thing?

[Professor Katherine French]

So I think the people who are doing this are fine with this. I mean, why wouldn't you want to be able to take care of your children? Uh, this idea that medieval people didn't love their children, it's frankly nonsense. Yes, they thought about their children differently than modern people. I think they don't romanticize childhood the way modern, or at least modern Americans romanticized childhood. But medieval people certainly loved their children, mourned them when they died, and wanted the best for them. Where you see unhappiness over these, the increasing use of household goods is when the elites feel like People below them are behaving in ways that are not appropriate to their status. And that this is, this emulation means that we have lower class people who are behaving like rich people and are social climbing. So elites are very unhappy about what they perceive to be social climbing. After the plague, people are earning too much money. They are dressing above their station, they are eating above their station. And as they are dressing and eating above their station, they're probably also moving, walking, carrying themselves differently, they're better nourished. Perhaps the clothing hangs differently. And so maybe they are deporting themselves in a way that makes them look to somebody who is just watching them on the street so that they look like a higher status person. So there's a lot of anxiety about social climbing, but I think that we have to pay attention to the fact that the people who are, are benefiting from more things and a materially more comfortable life are not using these things in the same way that elites are. They are using them in a world that is governed by mercantile concerns. And I frankly think that wanting the best for your children is not the, that's not social climbing. That is, you know, every parent's concern for their children. And so if you can get the doctor or the amulet or the bed sheets or the food that the rich have to make their children survive, why wouldn't you want it for your own children? I don't think that emulation is the right way to look at that kind of behavior. It, it doesn't really tell us about social climbing. It tells us about parents and households caring for each other and wanting to be comfortable, wanting to be warm, wanting to be healthy. And while there is social climbing and there is certainly social emulation, again, the economy that Londoners are dealing with is, is, is different than what an aristocrat is dealing with. And so an aristocrat may go to a wealthy merchant's house and say, huh, they've got tapestries from the Low Countries like I have. And you know, I'm not very comfortable with this merchant being as rich as, as I am or behaving like I am. But the merchant is using that wall hanging not only for comfort and for decoration, but he's also using it to make the aristocrat who is his customer comfortable in his house so that he can sell him more goods. And so that wall hanging does something slightly differently in a rich merchant's house than it does in an aristocrat's house.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

These sorts of nuances are very interesting to see, especially given the kind of dual narratives of, like, on the one hand, we have all these people happy to do it, and then we've also got literature saying, this is really horrible. So interesting to kind of parse out what might be going on here. The last aspect, though, of people's daily lives that I wonder if we can talk about was another aspect that was really important at this time generally, and I imagine also an even bigger deal after, as you said, the trauma of all of this. What was going on with piety, or especially domestic piety inside the house in this post plague era.

[Professor Katherine French]

So this is a really interesting question because the. There's a tendency in, at least in some of the older historic literature, and certainly it's a conclusion my students often jump to early on, is that the plague brought the Reformation. And then I have to point out that actually the Reformation, at least in England, is a good 200 years later. And so, no, it's not an immediate jump from the plague to the Reformation. There's 200 years of enthusiastic participation in parish life that is very orthodox, very rooted in the saints, very rooted in attending Mass that's presided over by an ordained priest. But you do see at the same time in this period, I think, an increase in interest in people participating in religion and looking for ways to try and develop a personal relationship with the divine. And I don't think that is a Protestant or a Reformation thing. I think that is the development of piety, perhaps in response to trauma. I think that's a. It's a. I think that probably that is at play. It is also in response to access to things in the marketplace that will facilitate your piety. You can buy prayer beads. They don't have to be expensive. They could be made out of wood. They could be made out of bone. That's mostly what archaeologists actually find. They're gonna help you with your piety. They also look cool, and they sound kind of cool hanging on your belt, but they can help you with your piety. You have the development of new pious practices, prayer cycles like the rosary. So we see that there are objects that will move people's piety that might be, at least on one hand, motivated by a desire for consumption. But at the same time, this is a world that is continually being revisited by plague. People are still dying. They're still missing the people that have died, that are in their families. And so certainly there is more material for religious practice in homes after the plague. And I make a distinction between the kinds of religious items or items we might think of as religious that Might really be more accurately classified as art. You walk into the great hall, there's a hanging, a giant tapestry hanging, or just a painted cloth, something much more affordable. But it's a picture of the crucifixion or a picture of the nativity. You know, we might see that as religious, but I think most of the people in the house would become a little inured toward to it. It's decoration. But there might be a shrine in the bedroom that was a really common place to have religious objects. You're really vulnerable when you're sleeping, and so you might have a modest little saint shrine. You might be able to open and close doors on it. You would hang your prayer beads next to it, or maybe you would hang your prayer beads on your. By your bed so they would help protect you at night. You might have a little statue of a saint. We know that there are all kinds of little statues of saints that are available. The archaeological record is full of them. Made out of terra cotta. Nice ones would be made out of alabaster. Really cheap ones might be made out of pressed metal. So you could have a St. John's head, which would protect you and your sleeping family at night. And it would perhaps, you know, on a table or on a chest next to the bed. Your bed itself might have saints images or the Virgin Mary on them as a part of this, extending protection in this really dangerous world. There are holy water receptacles outside your, your bedroom. So when you, you go into your bedroom to sleep at night, you can bless yourself with holy water. But when you leave in the morning, you can also bless yourself when you, when you go about your day, when somebody comes in to clean the bedroom, whether it's a servant or the housewife, they can bless themselves again when they, when they walk by or, or go in. So we definitely see more evidence of domestic piety after the plague. And if you're really, really rich, you might in fact have a domestic chapel. It might be, you know, fairly elaborate, separate room with vestments for your hired priest and altar cloths that will go with the liturgical seasons. If you're not so wealthy, it might be also part of your bedroom that you have a little altar. You have a priest who comes by. You have maybe not a lot of different sets of vestments or altar cloths, but a few. So again, it can be scaled up. If you're really rich, it can be scaled back. If you're not really rich, it could be made out of different kinds of materials, depending, again, also on your wealth. But I think that this increase in material culture around piety, both in the household and in parish churches, is a consequence of trying to figure out about this world where people still are dying of this disease that you can't cure.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that remains such a question, not just in the immediate aftermath, but for quite a long time after that, as you've helped us understand, with all sorts of impacts on people's stuff and behaviors and places that they're living and what they're doing. So thank you for helping us understand what this world was like. Leaving me with just a final question of anything about the work you've been doing since this book came out that you'd like to give us a sneak preview of or share a little bit about.

[Professor Katherine French]

So I'm still interested in material culture and I'm still very interested in houses. I think having grown up also in old houses with a father who was constantly renovating them, and then having owned my own old houses, I think, yeah, I'm just interested in houses. So I found some records that are about a house in London that I can trace from 1321, well through the Great Fire, you know, and beyond. I actually know where it doesn't exist now, obviously, but there's now a nondescript office building on the location with a martini bar in the ground floor. But for about 110 years is a lodging house. And I know who the tenants are in the nine rooms that are being rented out. So I'm writing a history of this, of this house where the bulk of the book is about the time when it is a lodging house. A quarter of the tenants are women renting rooms on their own. And so I think this will be a really interesting insight into the lives of ordinary women, working class women, people who are poor, who are not wealthy enough to live in a house, but are living in one room and probably also working in that room doing piecework. So this is a house that's not of the working, not of the destitute. But as London's economy changes from the pre plague to post plague to the Tudor economy, the tenants change. And so I'm tracing, you know, the changing stability and mobility precarity of the people who are living in this house.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that sounds very interesting. Thank you for sharing that with us. And of course, best of luck with that project.

[Professor Katherine French]

Thank you. Thank you. I'm kind of hoping I'll have a completed draft by the end of next year, if the sabbatical gods favor me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, here's hoping. And while you're working on that, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in2021. Catherine, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Professor Katherine French]

Well, thank you so much for having me. It was fun.