The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (41 page)

A man wrote her story, and it shows.
We’re told she had two men in her life, her husband and her brother-in-law Guy,
who served as her spiritual adviser, but she does not belong to either of them;
independence is the essence of being a beguine. She was also known as ‘the mother
of the brothers [meaning monks] of Oignies’, which makes her someone of authority
in the monastic system; but beguines were suspect precisely because they stayed outside
that system. She
works, and she fills every
minute of the day and she is thoroughly devout; she labours and she also acts out of
charity. That you might expect, but beguines were discreet persons, dressed like
ordinary middle-class women and keeping mostly to their own walled courts; and Marie was
dramatic, vomiting blood, running away into the woods from visitors, dressed rather
meanly and not entirely clean for ‘studiously sought cleanness pleased her
never’. She even preached.
²³

She served her purpose admirably: a
man’s explanation of why any woman would choose to be a beguine.

There are reasons why women were able to
make these choices in the north-west of Europe and nowhere else, and able to make them
work. The first is the merchant business that crossed the seas, and the way it made
families and marriages more flexible. It’s not that women were liberated, or that
men no longer ruled; but women who were not noble or royal were finding they had
unexpected chances.

Consider Jewish women in the North, no
longer required to keep to the rules of modesty that Judaism laid down and Islam imposed
in Spain. If they had money to lend, they offered it to gentile women for their work and
their homes, but they also lent to gentile men. When their husbands went travelling, the
wives had to manage the business. They went out to bargain with men, some Jewish, some
gentiles, and held talks with feudal lords; they could strike deals with merchant rivals
of their husbands if they reckoned the merchants had better contacts. Where the great
rabbi Maimonides thought no Jewish woman should ever be alone with a gentile, even if
his wife was present, because ‘they are shameless’, the Tosafot commentaries
on the Talmud simply say ‘it is impossible that a woman not be left alone with a
non-Jew at some time’. A woman went on business with a stranger, stopped to rest
in a forest and was molested by two men. She was told she was committing adultery just
to sit down with other men, that she should never be alone with a stranger; but the
rabbis ruled otherwise. They said they turned a blind eye to women going about on
business because it happened all the time.
²⁴

There was more: a subtle shift in how men
were required to understand their marriages. Rabbis began to tell them to marry only one
woman, not to stay away from home more
than eight months at a time, and not to go at all if they were not getting on with their
wives, because the journey was just an excuse to leave them.
²⁵
Marriage was
chosen, a companionship, not just a contract.

This edging towards a kind of equality, even
among people who had no doubt that men should rule, had a very terrible side. Just as
lives were opening up, crusaders were on their way to the Holy Land, and inspiring
murderous pogroms against the Jews along the Rhine. Faced with forced conversion to
Christianity, it was the women who had to decide whether and when to end their lives and
their children’s lives to save them from betraying their faith; and then they had
to kill. They performed sacrifices as they never were allowed to do in the Jerusalem
Temple; phrases used for high priests, even Abraham himself, now applied to women.

Mistress Rachel in Trier picked up the knife
and beat herself, knowing what had to be done but ‘with an embittered
heart’. She killed three of her children and had to pull a fourth, her son Aaron,
out by his feet from under a box where he was hiding and she sat lamenting over their
bodies until the Christians came to demand ‘the money you have in your
sleeves’ and then to kill her. We know the details of both her pain and her
courage, but of her husband we know only that he ‘yelled and cried upon seeing the
death of his four beautiful sons … he went and fell on the sword that was in
his hand … he rolled with the dead’.
²⁶

In the Flemish town of Douai in the
thirteenth century, when the aldermen had to speak to a whole craft or a whole
profession, they addressed ‘boulengiers ne boulengiere’ or ‘drappiers
ne drappiere’ or ‘taneres ne taneresse’. They always included both
women and men who were bakers, drapers, tanners. In Bruges they went one step further:
they addressed the bosses of the town as ‘mester’ and
‘mestrigghe’.
²⁷

Out in the country women worked the land,
helped plough and kill pigs, made ale and cheese, spun wool and wove cloth; but they did
not inherit as their brothers might, and making a living had everything to do with
having the use of property. If they were paid
wages they earned much less than a man. A thirteenth-century
bailiff in England, in a book that was copied again and again, says it is worth having a
dairymaid to look after the small animals even if you don’t have a dairy:
‘it is always good to have a woman there, at a much less cost than a
man’.
²⁸

The pull of towns, where a woman could earn
more, change her job or her employer, maybe start a business of her own, was the
prospect of having a household of her own in time.

Women worked in the cloth trades, of course,
since Flanders was famous for cloth; but that was only the start. They were
moneychangers, not just informally pushing some useful cash across to friends and
neighbours but acting as bank managers. They were shipbuilders, too. They went out to
run and clean houses, they formed their own hierarchy in the markets: from the ones who
had their own businesses to the ones who had their own market stalls to the women who
sold from a cloth spread on the ground and were relentlessly moved on.
²⁹
In Bruges,
they dominated the market for everything edible but meat; drink was another matter, but
even so there was a Kateline van Denille who had a wine shop. They could be sureties for
the debts of people who were not their relatives, and if they were married they did not
have to follow their husbands’ trades; a separating couple in Ghent in 1355 was
reckoned able to live apart without being a burden on the town because they had been
‘practising different trades and paying their own expenses’.
³⁰
When
married women were doing business, suing or being sued, the clerks keeping the records
quite often did not find the marriage worth mentioning.

Women did not go travelling as merchants so
they often had the city, the hostel, the shop, the warehouse or the money business to
themselves while their husbands went away; they were the constant, stable heart of
business. They represented the family, and in Flemish law that meant the present reality
of the married couple much more than the children who would eventually inherit. Women
shared. They had authority over children just like any father. A mother and her
children, even if they were all born out of wedlock, formed a family with the mother at
its head; there was a Flemish custom that a mother has no bastards, no need to make
special provision for
children who happened
to be ‘illegitimate’. So while families took the name of the father, should
there be one available, the mother could perfectly well be head of the household: in the
house, in the business, in the world.

That was the world around the beguinages:
where women took responsibility for their families and for their own survival, where
almost no trade or business was forbidden to them, where they could operate more or less
freely and independently without their gender being an issue. The beguines learned. When
they brought children into the beguinages, even ones born out of wedlock, they did what
any mother would do. When they went out to work, they did what other women did: worked
for wages. They could, like other women, protect themselves at law, by demanding back
money they had loaned or claiming property that somebody else also claimed. The richer
beguines brought their capital into the courts, built their own houses there and owned
them; exactly as a woman could do out in the city. As for a woman’s authority, and
the power of the mistress of a beguinage, there were also women who controlled castles
or abbeys and held public audiences, not to mention financial receivers who explained
their accounts at public audit; citizens knew very well that women could have power.
Only the countess was meant to have a male to speak for her, but then the countess
belonged to a fading feudal system which never did have deep roots in Flanders.

The beguines begin to seem less
exceptional.

William Aungier was eight when he lost his
father, then his mother, then his stepfather to the plague. His new guardian, his uncle,
sold the right to be his guardian to a local man who happened to have a niece called
Johanna, aged ten. The pair went through a ceremony of marriage and were duly put into
bed to spend the night. They then went their separate ways until they were old enough to
consent to a real marriage, but just before William was fourteen and legally
marriageable, Johanna turned out to be pregnant by one of her surprisingly various
lovers. William was packed off to his notional wife in 1357, but he refused to
consummate the marriage, not even after spending a night
solus cum sola, nudus cum
nuda
, which means
alone and naked
in the same bed. He told friends: ‘It displeases me that I knew her once for she
does not care for any affection that is felt.’ He wanted his marriage annulled
because, he said, he wanted to base his marriage on ‘an affection that is
upheld’. He wanted love and constancy.
³¹

He had learned well. After the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215, English priests worked from pastoral manuals that taught them
what to teach believers, including the doctrine that marriage is a matter of
consent.
³²
The woman chooses, the man chooses, and the choice must be mutual:
both partners almost equal for a moment, whether the motive is love or business. This
teaching was meant to go all through Christendom, but when it came to the North Sea it
was particularly powerful because it fitted perfectly with custom, and so with the law.
In the law school at Bologna the scholars learned that what made a marriage real was the
consummation, but in Paris and the North a marriage was already real when woman and man
consented to it, although the next and essential stage was the consummation. When you
see a picture of a wedding in an Anglo-French manuscript, there will be a priest because
marriage is a matter of the spirit. In Italy, there will be a notary, because of the
contract.
³³

The differences go much deeper, so deep they
may well help explain what happened to the whole economic machine around the North Sea
over centuries, and why it did not happen in quite the same way in the South. They
explain, among many other things, windmills and pensions.

A woman marrying in the South brought a
dowry with her, money or goods or land. Families negotiated the amount, which had
everything to do with what the woman might contribute to the marriage: how young she
was, how strong, how likely to bear children. The older the woman, the more expensive
the dowry, so there was every reason to marry girls off as soon as possible. Even when
the marriage involved rather little money or goods or land, the dowry mattered; it was
the one time in her life when a woman could expect money from her parents. If she wanted
money to get her life started, she had to marry to get it; but once she was married, the
dowry was all she could control herself. If she and her husband built
a fortune out of a business or their land, that was his
fortune, not theirs.

The custom in the North was different. Women
had the right to inherit, so they expected money from their parents, but only when their
parents died. They could come into land, sell it off or give it away, all in their own
names; it was theirs. They had no financial reason to marry early, and their parents had
no reason to fret over when they married. Dowries were never as common as in the South
and in a prosperous city like Ghent, in the late Middle Ages, they are hardly even
mentioned.

When a woman did decide to marry, all that
she had was put into a kind of marital fund: one pot of money for both wife and husband.
The husband controlled the money for as long as he was alive, but the wife could inherit
it, and she could do business with her share. She might have a deal, like one woman in
Nivelles in 1471, that she took everything if her husband walked out, at least until he
returned ‘to talk and to remain in peace and love as suits the loyalty of married
people’.
³⁴
Her husband didn’t always have to know what she was doing
with their money; in York, Thomas Harman first knew his wife had bought a batch of
candlewick so huge it took two servants to carry it when he was handed writs for debt
and breach of commercial promise.
³⁵

Inheritance mattered because sickness and
war so often cut lives short and left survivors. Second or even third marriages were
common, and they were sometimes practical alliances made startlingly soon after a
husband’s death, marrying a rival, marrying the apprentice; look at marriage
contracts for the town of Douai in the fifteenth century and a third of the brides were
widows.
³⁶
They brought with them the riches they had helped to build. In Douai
the custom was that they kept half the assets of the marriage, and they seem to have
been able to sidestep their husband’s debts. A woman’s economic life could
be long in the North, where a husband’s death was not the end of things and a
woman could do well without being married.