Reworking the Household in The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools

Bibliographic Data

ID8865738
AuthorsWendy A Matlock (corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume95
Issue2
Pages109-130
Publication date2014-02-17
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0013838x.2014.882112
OpenAlexW2074916876
LanguageEN
References cited32

The anonymous late fifteenth-century poem known as The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools relies on the medieval tradition of debate poetry to normalise new ideas about patriarchal authority, households and family. Its form looks back to the literary conventions of the Middle Ages while its content anticipates early modern ideas about family and labour. Notes1For an indictment of unquestioning acceptance of periodisation see Aers. Works such as James Simpson's Reform and Cultural Revolution and Peggy A. Knapp's Time-Bound Words productively transgress these traditional divisions.2Salter, 6.3McSheffrey, 7–8.4Ibid., 8.5Smith, 1.6Martha C. Howell (Women, 9–10) describes how family members moved easily between market production and subsistence production.7Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 7–8; Goldberg, Medieval England, 101.8While parental pressure and economic concerns undoubtedly influenced marital choices in late medieval England, mutual affection also played a role in marriage formation. See Goldberg, "Female Labour," 26–28.9Jones, 68.10P. J. P. Goldberg observes an increasing desire for privacy and intimate space in late medieval bourgeois homes ("The Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity," 136).11Howell, Women, 87–92; Swanson, "The Illusion of Economic Structure," 39–40. See in addition Judith M. Bennett's discussion of the London Brewers' Guild (60–76), and Anne F. Sutton's overview of women's involvement in the mercery craft (27). Barbara Hanawalt's caution that there was no "golden age" of women in business in the early fifteenth century is important. She explains that her evidence "suggests that a few more women were in business in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, but these were not high-status positions, and they did not translate into official power. Only a tiny minority of women had the training or the capital to move into entrepreneurial positions." Nonetheless, she also notes that even those few women were "increasingly squeezed out" of the opportunities they had in late fifteenth-century London. See Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, 183.12J. O. Halliwell provides the title in his nineteenth-century edition of the poem.13Dating the poem more precisely has not been possible. Although Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 dates to the late fifteenth century and was copied by a single scribe who signs his name as Rate, Rate was probably not its composer. Given its particular social and economic interests, which I describe below, I believe that the poem was composed near to the time Rate copied it down. The Middle English Dictionary dates it c. 1500. For more about dating the manuscript, see Edward Wilson, 445; Hirsh, 347–9; and Shuffelton, ed., 2–3.14Debate poetry is a modern term for the verse debates that proliferated in Latin and many western European vernaculars, especially in Middle English. H. Walther and Francis Lee Utley provide a good survey of the field. See also Reed; and Bossy, ed. Neil Cartlidge has challenged the coherence of a genre of debate poetry, nonetheless, he acknowledges the existence of "a set of related traditions" or "a nexus of genres" ("Medieval Debate-Poetry," 244). The fact that The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools is the only debate included in MS Ashmole 61, which does include several dialogues, may support Cartlidge's argument. Its structural similarities to other poems with debate elements, however, justify comparison with other Middle English works often included in lists of debate poems.15Thomas L. Reed most thoroughly explores patterns of irresolution in debate poems.16For more on irresolution in The Owl and the Nightingale, see Reed, 247–60; Matlock, "Law and Violence."17See discussions of irresolution in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls in Sklute; and Reed, 323–39. For The Assembly of Ladies, see Matlock, "And Long to Sue."18Edward Wilson, 452; and Shuffelton, 456.19See Cartlidge's (ed.) overview of allegorical readings in The Owl and the Nightingale, XVI–XVIII.20See, for example, Olson, 62–4.21For more about the characterisation of the birds, see Mann, 149–200.22The exact nature of many of the tools remains obscure, but scholars agree they are all associated with carpentry. See Edward Wilson, 462–8.23Shuffelton, l. 1. All quotations from The Debate of the Carpenter's Tools come from George Shuffelton's edition and line numbers will be indicated in parentheses in the text.24Goldberg explains, "Both servants and apprentices were primarily remunerated in terms of bed, board and clothing" ("Life and Death," 420).25Although the book concentrates on more elite households and fashions, for more about how clothing served to associate people with a specific household or guild, see Crane. Heather Swanson explains that elite manufacturing companies adopted liveries to distinguish their elites ("The Illusion of Economic Structure," 32).26For more on the alewife as a cultural figure, see Hanna, 4–13.27Robertson, 1063.28Brown, 5.29Luke Wilson, 122.30Amos, 93.31Goldberg, Medieval England, 66.32Swanson, "The Illusion of Economic Structure," 45–6.33As Hanawalt notes, apprentices often complained that their masters had failed to teach them the trade (Growing Up, 157).34For example, a founders' ordinance from 1390 limits each master to one apprentice even though their workshops tended to be larger than those of other artisans. See Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 73.35Goldberg, Medieval England, 66.36Howell, "The Gender of Europe's Commercial Economy," 522.37Shuffelton, see lines 31, 71, 87, 113, and 155, which introduce tools in similar terms.38For a discussion of the many reasons and ways a contract could be broken, see Hanawalt, Growing Up, 155–68.39Similar to apprentices, children would also have been expected to be temporary residents within their parents' household. Swanson suggests only about 50 per cent of artisans' sons followed their fathers' trade and many who did were likely to set up their own shops rather than move into that of their parents (Medieval Artisans, 165).40Hanawalt discusses historical examples of bad apprentices (Growing Up, 155–6).41 The Good Wife's Guide, 122.42Riddy, 17.43McSheffrey, 7–8.44Quoted in Goldberg, "Life and Death," 429.45See Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 74; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 99–101; and Hanawalt, "Remarriage as an Option," 158–9.46Howell, Women, 88–94; Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, 183.47Indeed, it would have been unusual for wives to assist building craftsmen, who usually worked away from home. See Mate, 284–5. The fact that a poem specifically about carpentry, a trade that typically excluded women even when other guilds had permitted them, stresses the need to separate wives and apprentices indicates the impetus to carry this separation into the home and to distinguish workers from kin.48"Noah (Chester)," ll. 109, 111–12.49Travis, 100. See also Fitzgerald, 57–60.50Karras, 145.51Swanson, Medieval Artisans, 84.52Munby, 389.53Edward Wilson, 448.54See especially Edward Wilson, 448–52; and Conlee, 223.55See Blanchfield, 212; and Hirsh, 347.56Taylor, 58–9.57Shuffelton, 458.58Edward Wilson, 452.59More, 79.60Ibid., 75.61See Laslett. Peter Laslett reports that the average household in Western Europe featured the following: 1) a single set of parents and their offspring; 2) a mother who bore children late; 3) husbands and wives of similar ages; and 4) unrelated servants (90). English urban households from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries tended to have fewer than five persons, including live-in servants. Goldberg estimates that a household mean of fewer than four persons was typical in late fourteenth-century York, and Charles Phythian-Adams shows that the mean household size from early sixteenth-century Coventry was 3.6 to 3.8 persons (see Phythian-Adams, 245; and Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle, 306). Mary S. Hartman highlights the late-marriage household structure that More implicitly critiques to argue that this structure is distinctively northwestern European, that it pre-dates the modern era and that it established "critical preconditions for the entire range of familiar developments associated with modern Western societies—not just economic transformation but everything from Protestant upheaval to scientific revolution, mass democratic movements, and major alterations in the relations between the sexes" (31)

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