Medieval Family Life

Medieval Family Life (MFL) is a collection of letters and documents from the four major 15th-century English family collections. The collection was created from source material from the British Library, Chetham's Library, the National Archives, and the West Yorkshire Archives. It consists of the Paston Family Papers, the Celys Family Papers, the Plumpton Correspondence, the Stonor Correspondence, and the Armburgh Family Papers. These include the only surviving family letter collections from the medieval period in England. These letter collections and associated manuscripts reveal the details of medieval life in the areas of business and trade, politics, community, family affairs, and relationships.  From arranging advantageous marriages and inheritances, through estate management and financial dealings, to women and their role in the family. 

The opening screen consists of a welcome statement outlining the content of the collections. At the top, there's a toolbar containing buttons for the "Introduction," " Browse All Documents," "Visual Gallery," "Map," and " Research Tools." At the very top right of the screen is a Search button. The Search box lets users do a basic, advanced, or popular search, which has links to set searches for people and places important in the four family collections. The section "Browse All documents" allows users to view the various manuscript images and printed editions. They can restrict the scope of searches to county, families, dates, document types (manuscripts or printed books), and library/archive. Transcripts of the correspondence are fully searchable, and contextual secondary source material accompanies the manuscripts, along with original images linked directly to the transcriptions. Display of manuscripts and transcripts works very well, allowing side-by-side comparison with options for both landscape and portrait views. Users can read the original manuscript on screen left, maneuvering and zooming with ease, while also viewing the transcript on screen right.  All manuscripts, printed editions, and transcripts are in PDFs for downloading and printing. The section "Visual Sources Gallery" is full of images depicting a wide variety of medieval activities. The image detail is superb, and the colors brilliant. 

The section "Research Tools" provides necessary auxiliary aids to users. The introductory essay "The Family Letter Collections of Fifteenth England" was written by Joel Rosenthal, a well-known scholar of late medieval England. It will help users better interpret and understand the issues involved. "Medieval Family Life: A Tutorial" is a section devoted to teaching that includes a tutorial briefly treating 18 diverse social history topics. Teachers will find that the documents of this collection are helpful for history teaching, especially in training students' abilities for annotating primary sources. For example, teachers can let students read the account of expenses of law proceedings at Bruges, and let students think and answer the following questions: What do the Cely letters tell us about the social standing of their contacts in the Low Countries? What do the Cely letters tell us about marts, fairs or markets in the region of Antwerp and Bruges? What types of luxury goods could be purchased in these two cities? What factors caused the foreign merchants to leave Bruges and choose Antwerp as their center of operations?

The "Family Trees" section illustrates the relationships between the members of the Cely, Paston, Plumpton, and Stonor families; it provides biographical information on individuals where known. The "Chronology" identifies births, deaths, and significant events among family members. The "Glossary" section defines and contextualizes hundreds of unusual or specialist terms occurring in the Medieval Family Life letters and encompasses many variant spellings.  

Overall, for an esoteric area of research, MFL is remarkably easy to use and accessible. The online system lets users approach the material in an appropriate variety of ways, allowing them to see broad brushstrokes of the period as well as very granular detail. Letters from these fifteenth-century family collections are of value for what they tell us about the world in which they were written. They are also of value for what they tell us about the consciousness and interests of a goodly number of almost-ordinary people of that world. As well as the factual information or data that come through, we have no end of glimpses of how people perceived and interpreted the world around them. The letters allow us to read the words of men and women, clerics and layfolk, servants and their masters and mistresses, and, almost, to hear them talking. Whether the information was serious or trivial, welcome or not, it came as the result of a decision that it was worth transmitting.