EVENT: Friends of the Library talk

How did ordinary people in the years around 1300-1600 arrange their family lives? It’s often said that they lived in nuclear families rather like ours (or like our ideals) - parents committed to a stable marriage, living with their children under one roof. But more recent research suggests that for most of the population - small landholders, working people and the very poor - living in a true nuclear family may have been the exception rather than the rule. Fluid marriage customs, poverty, servanthood, or deaths of family members all caused households easily to dissolve and recombine; and people to move easily between households and relationships.

By following the poignant stories of some of these individuals, recorded in the church courts of late-medieval England, the stories of their marriages, family and households are reconstructed.