Feudal England did not express herself so strongly, but a dowerless daughter was felt to be a heavy burden, and a daughter with a portion was treated simply as a marketable commodity.
On the labouring classes the tyranny of the feudal system pressed grievously. A licence had to be bought to go outside the bounds of the lord of the manor to obtain work. For instance, an orphan girl, in the reign of Edward III., paid sixpence for the privilege of serving and marrying “wheresoever and whensoever she pleases.”[4] A woman living on the estate of a feudal lord was regarded as, in a manner, his property. If she married a stranger and left the manor, the lord was entitled to compensation, as being deprived of part of his “live stock.”
All through the Middle Ages it was the aim of the government to keep the people on the land, to prevent the agricultural population from quitting the rural districts. No father who could not show an income of £20 a year in land or rent might apprentice his son or daughter to any trade. This effectually cut off the chances of the majority of the working class from migrating to the towns. The system, unworkable as it appears, did not die out until the sixteenth century.
Powerful as was the Church in the Middle Ages, it was not able to protect women outside the shade of the cloister. And it will be readily understood how great was the influence of the priest in an age when the mass of the people were so little able to think and judge for themselves; in an age when belief in the supernatural encompassed daily life with terrors, when the common laws of nature were dim mysteries, when disease and misfortune were ascribed to the malevolence of witches and evil spirits. The Church was the supreme arbiter, and to question her decrees was to incur the risk of eternal misery. The powers of evil could only be exorcised by holy water and priestly aid, and lapses into sin were atoned for by substantial offerings. It was easy to persuade women, always more susceptible than men to the emotional and imaginative side of religion, that their dreams and fancies were divine warnings. In that quaint collection of fourteenth-century maxims known as the “Book of the Knight of Latour Landry,” the story is related of a young wife who was induced to desert her husband for a lover, and fell sick. She had a vision of a fiery pit, which a priest interpreted to signify the abode of lost spirits, into which she would have been plunged but for her piety in supporting one hundred priests to say masses for the souls of her parents, and in dispensing charity among the poor.
But if the Church tyrannized over the people and took advantage of their ignorance, it was a great uplifting and civilizing power in their lives. But for the Church the Middle Ages would been one dark night of un-illumined barbarism. The Church summed up in herself all that existed of knowledge and culture. It was the symbol of order, progress, and learning. In time of war it was a haven of peace. It was the Church that enabled women to live secure, sheltered lives in the midst of turmoils and danger. It was the guardian of the people’s consciences, and possessed over them a power of life and death.
Looked at from a lighter side, the Church was a potent factor in every-day life. Her festivals were one of the chief recreations of the people. To women especially, whose diversions were fewer than those of men, the feast-days, with their processions and ceremonials, were welcome excitements. In the services of the Church women found an outlet for the gratification of the æsthetic sense which nothing else afforded. If the main features of social life in the Middle Ages be remembered—the sordidness of the dwellings, the absence of everything beyond the barest necessaries in the majority of homes, the lack of indoor recreations, and of all the resources of modern times afforded by the means of locomotion—it will not appear strange that the Church as a social force should have wielded such power.
The rise of the middle classes was the rise of a power antagonistic to the Church. It was the beginning of the revolt against constituted authority. It foreshadowed the strife between reason and dogma. All the movements that have arisen against the power of the Church have come from the middle classes. The spirit of inquiry which led men to question the claims of an infallible priesthood, and culminated in the breakdown of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in England, had its birth among the middle classes. The modern scientific movement, to which the Anglican Church has been so bitterly opposed, started from the same source. The battle for freedom of worship, whether fought by Anglicans against Romanists, or by Dissenters against Anglicans, has been mainly carried on by members of the middle classes.
After the fall of feudalism, in the period immediately preceding the Reformation, the extension of commerce was raising the middle classes into power. New paths were opening out, and as riches were more diffused and intercourse between different parts of the country and with other nations became easier, the influence of the Church was weakened. It became less dominant as new interests arose.
It was in this period that a remarkable step was taken among women of the middle class—a step which shows that their interest in public affairs was very keen. A number of city dames drew up a petition to Parliament and presented it in person. It was not the stimulus of private interest or the sharp spur of national calamity that sent them to the doors of the legislature. It is a significant fact that it was an affront offered to a woman which stirred the citizens’ wives to action in the year 1429, when that unfortunate kinglet, the puppet of his party, Henry VI., was nominally reigning. The Duke of Gloucester’s matrimonial concerns were creating a good deal of agitation. He had put away his wife, the Countess Jacqueline of Hainault, daughter of William IV., Count of Holland, and widow of the Dauphin John, and set in her place Eleanor Cobham. The good citizenesses were full of righteous wrath. They resolved to present a remonstrance to the House of Lords.
“One Mistress Stokes, with divers other stout women of London, of good account and well apparelled, came openly to the Upper House of Parliament and delivered letters to the Duke of Gloucester, to the Archbishop, and other lords there present, containing matters of rebuke and sharp reprehension to the said Duke of Gloucester because he would not deliver his wife Jacqueline out of her grievous imprisonment, being then detained prisoner by the Duke of Burgundy, and suffering her to remain unkindly whilst he kept another adulteress contrary to the law of God and the honourable estate of matrimony.”