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Missing Women: Sex Ratios in England, 1000–1500

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2014

Sandy Bardsley
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Abstract

This article proposes that late medieval English men may have outnumbered women by a significant margin, perhaps as high as 110 to 115 men for every 100 women. Data from both documentary and archaeological sources suggest that fewer females survived to adulthood and that those who did may have died younger than their husbands and brothers. Historians of medieval England have said little about the possibility of a skewed sex ratio, yet if women were indeed “missing” from the population as a whole in a significant and sustained way, we must reinterpret much of the social, economic, gender, and cultural history of late medieval England.

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 273 - 309
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2014 

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References

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15 Coleman, Emily, “Infanticide in the Early Middle Ages,” in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Stuard, Susan Mosher (Philadelphia, 1976), 47–70Google Scholar (initially published in Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations in 1974). For one response, see Siegfried, Michael, “The Skewed Sex Ratio in a Medieval Population: A Reinterpretation,” Social Science History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 195–204Google Scholar. Coleman's article was also critiqued harshly by Ring, Richard R. in “Early Medieval Peasant Households in Central Italy,” Journal of Family History 4, no. 1 (March 1979): 2–25Google Scholar. Robert J. Rowland Jr.'s analysis of the children of slaves in Sardinian condaghi from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, found similarly high ratios in pastoral regions. Like Coleman, he found that sex ratios increased with household size. The obvious explanation, he concluded, was female infanticide, but this was “deduced rather than demonstrated” (“The Sardinian Condaghi: Neglected Evidence for Mediaeval Sex Ratios,” Florilegium 4 [1982]: 117–22Google Scholar). Although based on the postmedieval period, Richard Wall also found that birth rank and occupational structure correlated with gendered differences in infant mortality in five English parishes between 1550 and 1800. As Wall has suggested, local community needs, especially work opportunities for women, may have played a critical role in the differential neglect of girls (“Inferring Differential Neglect of Females from Mortality Data,” Annales de Démographie Historique [1981]: 119–40Google Scholar).

16 Herlihy, David, “Life Expectancies for Women in Medieval Society,” in The Role of Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Morewedge, Rosmarie Thee (Albany, 1975), 1–22Google Scholar.

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20 Herlihy, David and Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, 1985), 131–58Google Scholar.

21 Although the sample presumably excludes those too poor to make a will, Maristella Botticini makes a good case that all sons and daughters were mentioned, even daughters for whom dowries had already been provided. Botticini, “Social Norms, Demographic Shocks, and Dowries in Florence, 1250–1450.” Working paper accessed online on 10 December, 2009 at http://econweb.tamu.edu/workshops/PERCpercent20Appliedpercent20Microeconomics/Maristellapercent20Botticini.pdf, 6, 16. This paper is no longer available online, but an abstract can be found at http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed004:4 (accessed 11 February 2013).

22 Molho, Anthony, Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 214–17Google Scholar.

23 Carmichael, Ann G., Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 1986), 135Google Scholar. In contrast, as Carmichael has shown (35–39), women outnumber men among those described as dying of “old age,” which might reflect greater longevity for Florentine women or less precision in explaining their causes of death.

24 Goldberg, P. J. P. has discussed the poll tax data regarding women in towns in “Urban Identity and the Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 43, no. 2 (May 1990): 194–216Google Scholar. My own calculation of 7,275 tax payers omits 35 “famuli” from Colchester. If the Colchester famuli are counted among the men, the total population increases to 7,310, the male urban population to 3,640, and the urban sex ratio to 99.1 men for every 100 women. Data is drawn from Fenwick, Carolyn C., ed., The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1998, 2000, 2005)Google Scholar. Any calculations, however, are my own responsibility. To the best of my knowledge, these towns and town fragments are the only ones from 1377 with comparable data surviving. I have omitted towns where the names of servants have been omitted. I am grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for allowing me to check my data against hers for some of these urban returns.

25 These numbers were drawn from Kowaleski's unpublished data (for Northumberland and Rutland) and from my own analyses of Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and Gloucestershire returns published in Fenwick, Poll Taxes, and in Saul, Nigel, “The Brockworth Poll Tax Return, 1377,” Historical Research 72, no. 177 (February 1999): 122–24Google Scholar. I excluded two clergy listed in the Brockworth return. Any calculations are my responsibility. These data include all returns for rural areas from 1377 with full and comparable data, so far as I am aware.

26 Chris Given-Wilson mentions in the introduction to his edited volume An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England (Manchester, 1996), 6Google Scholar, that perhaps one adult male in every fifteen was a member of the clergy in late medieval England. I have included clergy by assuming a rural/urban ratio of 85/15, dividing it by 14, and multiplying it by 15 to take account of the missing “one in fifteen” adult men. For numbers of professional religious, see Lepine, David, “England: Church and Clergy,” in A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Rigby, S. H. (Oxford, 2003), 359–80Google Scholar. Nuns constituted about 7 percent of the number of male religious professionals (approximately 2,000 of 36,500), so I increased the denominator by 7 percent of 1/14 of the weighted rural/urban male ratio (= .414).

27 Saul, “The Brockworth Poll Tax Return,” 124.

28 Carolyn C. Fenwick, “The English Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381: A Critical Examination of the Returns” (PhD diss., London School of Economics, 1983), 167–70, 174–97.

29 Among others, see Goldberg, “Urban Identity and the Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381,” for discussion of this issue.

30 Hallam, H. E., “Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 10, no. 3 (April 1958): 353–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Jones, E. D., “Going Round in Circles: Some New Evidence for Population in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 15, no. 4 (1989): 329–45Google Scholar; Bailey, Mark, “Blowing Up Bubbles: Some New Demographic Evidence for the Fifteenth Century?” Journal of Medieval History 15, no. 4 (December 1989): 347–58Google Scholar; Jones, E. D., “A Few Bubbles More: The Myntling Register Revisited,” Journal of Medieval History 17, no. 3 (September 1991): 263–69Google Scholar.

32 Russell, British Medieval Population, 166–69.

33 Biller, Measure of Multitude, 89–110.

34 Horrox, Rosemary, ed., The Black Death (Manchester, 1994), 85–87Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 57, 75.

36 Fleming, Robin, “Writing Biography at the Edge of History,” American Historical Review 114, no. 3 (June 2009): 606–14Google Scholar.

37 Gilchrist, Roberta, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London, 1994)Google Scholar.

38 This might serve as both advantage and disadvantage when it comes to recording data: on a dig for which there is ample time and labor, archaeologists can examine remains independently and reduce intraobserver differences; on a hurried dig, however (such as those pressured by the needs of impatient developers or those with insufficient funding), differences may be overlooked and the total picture thus skewed. Archaeologists are, of course, more than conscious of these issues and are thus cautious about overreading their data or combining data from one site to another.

39 University of Leicester Archaeological Services, “St. Margaret's, Leicester,” online at http://www.le.ac.uk/ulas/projects/margarets.html, last accessed 11 February 2013; Heather Wallis with Sue Anderson, A Medieval Cemetery at Mill Lane, Ormesby St. Margaret, Norfolk (Dereham, 2009), 1.

40 Grainger, Ian et al. , The Black Death Cemetery, East Smithfield, London (London, 2008), 28Google Scholar.

41 Some skeletons, once uncovered, are reinterred elsewhere. Such was the case with human remains from the cemetery at Ormesby St. Margaret, for instance, and with those from the Jewish cemetery at Jewbury in York. Wallis with Anderson, A Medieval Cemetery at Mill Lane, frontispiece; Lilley, J. M. et al. , The Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury (York, 1994), 297–300Google Scholar. Others become part of research collections, such as the various assemblages of skeletons held by the Calvin Wells Laboratory at the University of Bradford. Obviously the latter are far more available for retesting as new techniques become available.

42 Gilchrist, Roberta and Sloane, Barney, Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain (London, 2005), 194Google Scholar.

43 Daniell, Christopher, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (New York, 1997), 119–20Google Scholar. The bodies of ordinary people were rarely dismembered, although sometimes nobles requested that their hearts be detached from their corpses and buried in a symbolic location.

44 Bello, Silvia et al. , “Age and Sex Bias in the Reconstruction of Past Population Structures,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 129, no. 1 (February 2006): 24–38CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bello, Silvia and Andrews, Peter, “The Intrinsic Pattern of Preservation of Human Skeletons and Its Influence on the Interpretation of Funerary Behaviours,” in Social Archaeology of Funerary Remains, ed. Gowland, Rebecca and Knüsel, Christopher (Oxford, 2006), 10Google Scholar.

45 This theory was suggested by Walker, P. L. in “Problems of Preservation and Sexism in Sexing: Some Lessons from Historical Collections for Palaeodemographers,” in Grave Reflections: Portraying the Past through Cemetery Studies, ed. Saunders, S. R. and Herring, A. (Toronto, 1995), 31–46Google Scholar. Other studies have not substantiated Walker's argument. As Mays and Cox have pointed out, the accuracy of sexing techniques in the Spitalfields burials, in which the mean age of women was 56 years, would also undermine this theory (Mays, Simon and Cox, Margaret, “Sex Determination in Skeletal Remains,” in Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science [Cambridge, 2000], 125–26Google Scholar), although they recommend further investigation. For the large site of St. Mary Spital, discussed in detail below, Brian Connell notes that no significant differences were found in preservation levels of male versus female skeletons nor adult versus subadult skeletons. This suggests, he concludes, that “neither biological sex nor age affected bone survivability” at this site. Connell, Brian, Jones, Amy Gray, Redfern, Rebecca, and Walker, Don, A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital: Excavations at Spitalfields Market, London E1, 1991–2007 (London, 2012), 23Google Scholar.

46 For a good overview of methods of sexing skeletons, see Mays, Simon, The Archaeology of Human Bones, 2nd ed. (London, 2010), 40–46Google Scholar. While it is possible that, at any given site, a larger proportion of unsexable skeletons are those of women rather than those of men, this seems unlikely to explain the general pattern whereby men outnumber women. For one thing, there is only a weak correlation between high numbers of unsexable skeletons and high sex ratios (.435 if one includes all cemeteries considered in the parish sample below; .359 if one calculates only cemeteries with more than twenty-five skeletons). If the unsexable skeletons were disproportionately those of women, a higher correlation might be expected. Second, the proportions of skeletons deemed unsexable vary significantly by site, from a high of 50 percent (twelve skeletons) at the small site of St. Benet Sherehog to a low of 2.5 percent (one skeleton) at Thetford. In most sites, the number of unsexable skeletons is between 4 and 17 percent of the total.

47 Standard criteria often employed are those outlined in Brothwell, Don R., Digging Up Bones: The Excavation, Treatment, and Study of Human Skeletal Remains, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, 1981)Google Scholar; Buikstra, J. E. and Ubelaker, D. H., eds., Standards for Data Collection from Human Skeletal Remains: Proceedings of a Seminar at the Field Museum of Natural History (Indianapolis, 1994)Google Scholar.

48 Reeve, Jez, Adams, Max, Molleson, Theya, and Cox, Margaret, eds., The Spitalfields Project, 2 vols. (York, 1993), 2:23Google Scholar. Two skeletons thought by archaeologists to be those of males were identified on coffin plates as those of females. Indeed, in the Spitalfields sample, the sex ratio of almost exactly 100:100 in the skeletal population also matched that of the community at large as derived from Bills of Mortality, demonstrating a close correlation between the living and dead populations in terms of sex ratios (Molleson and Cox, The Spitalfields Project, 2:209).

49 These statistics, presented by Meindl et al. in “Accuracy and Direction of Error in the Sexing of the Skeleton,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 68, no. 1 (September 1985): 79–85Google Scholar, are cited by Mays in The Archaeology of Human Bones, 46. See also discussion of sexing techniques in Mays and Cox, “Sex Determination in Skeletal Remains.”

50 It is difficult to find a precise figure for the cost per skeleton. Estimates for high-profile cases in the news have ranged from several thousand dollars to more than $100,000 per individual.

51 In males, for instance, the greater sciatic notch in the hip tends to be deeper and narrower than in females, even when children are relatively young, but the difference is a matter of degrees. Craniofacial measurements and canine crown dimensions may also be used to assess age in children over five years, although they have proven accurate in only about three-quarters of cases. See The Churchyard, Wharram: A Study of Settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds, vol. 11, ed. Mays, S., Harding, C., and Heighway, C. (York, 2007), 91–92Google Scholar. See also Saunders, Shelley R., “Juvenile Skeletons and Growth-Related Studies,” in Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton, ed. Katzenberg, M. Anne and Saunders, Shelley R., 2nd ed. (Hoboken, 2008), 122–25Google Scholar.

52 In Wade-Martins, Peter, ed., Excavations in North Elmham Park, 1967–1972, 2 vols. (Gressenhall, 1980), 2:249Google Scholar. Also see his comments at 2:252, 253–54, 298.

53 Leach, Peter, ed., The Archaeology of Taunton: Excavations and Fieldwork to 1980 (Bristol, 1984), 195Google Scholar.

54 Discussed in Roberts and Cox, Health and Disease in Britain, 278–79. The parish cemetery of St. Nicholas Shambles was included, but none of the other cemeteries included in the study came from parishes.

55 This sample consists of all parish and local cemeteries of more than ten inhabitants with published and reputable data. I have excluded lay cemeteries attached to cathedrals or monastic institutions, even when these are known to have been open to the population at large, such as the lay cemetery of the Priory of Sts. Peter and Paul at Taunton; see Leach, ed., Archaeology of Taunton, 105, for burial customs whereby manorial inhabitants were buried in the lay cemetery of the priory. Although it would support my thesis, I have also excluded the “Paradise” cemetery of Winchester (169 men, 122 women) because of the high number of unsexed adults (more than 700), concerns about excavation methods, and lack of information about who was admitted to the cemetery (Kjølbye-Riddle, Birthe, “Dispersal or Concentration: The Disposal of the Winchester Dead over 2000 Years,” in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600, ed. Stephen Bassett [Leicester, 1992], 234–43Google Scholar). Thus my sample is likely biased toward the lower 90 percent of the population, because those of high elite status were usually buried in more prominent monastic cemeteries or inside churches. I have also excluded almshouses and hospitals, whose populations could include the “middling sort,” the genuinely destitute, or a combination of both groups (Rawcliffe, Carole, Leprosy in Medieval England [Woodbridge, 2006], 291–99Google Scholar). Jewish cemeteries, too, have been excluded, on the grounds that any cultural reasons for sex imbalance may not have been parallel in Christian and Jewish communities. Indeed, excavations at Jewbury in York found 163 male and 151 female skeletons, a closer sex ratio (108 men to 100 women) than for most Christian cemeteries (Lilley et al., The Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury, 431).

56 It must be noted that the numbers of recovered medieval skeletons vary considerably by site, from the London cemetery of St. Benet Sherehog (24 medieval adult skeletons, of which only 12 could be assigned a sex) to that of York's St. Helen-on-the-Walls (777 adult skeletons, of which 732 have been assigned a sex).

57 Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle, 151, 299.

58 Ibid., 311, 313–14.

59 In terms of chronology, few of these sites can be dated precisely. The Black Death cemetery at East Smithfield is unusual insofar as documentary evidence specifies the years of its use (Grainger et al., The Black Death Cemetery, 10–12). Most other cemeteries have to be dated using radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy, and dating of items found within graves. Many skeletons can only be dated to a period of several centuries, and this imprecision can seem frustrating to historians accustomed to more exact chronologies. For the purposes of this study, I have included skeletons dated between 1000 and 1500, although because the skeletons from St. Helen-on-the-Walls have not been dated more precisely than ca. 950–1550, I did stretch my chronological limits to include this important assemblage. Where possible, I have worked from catalogs of skeletons (sometimes included with archaeological reports) in addition to summaries of the demographic material, and have used more precise phasings included there.

60 DeWitte, S. N., “The Effect of Sex on Risk of Mortality during the Black Death in London, A.D. 1349–1350,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 2 (June 2009): 222–34Google Scholar.

61 Cohn, Samuel K. Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (New York, 2002), 210–12Google Scholar.

62 Mays et al., The Churchyard, 91–92.

63 Wallis with Anderson, A Medieval Cemetery at Mill Lane, 14.

64 Juliet Rogers and Geraldine Barber examined the skeletons initially. Tony Waldron explains the way in which data was compiled and checked in his report written after Juliet Rogers's death. St. Peter's, Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire: A Parish Church and Its Community, 2 vols. (Oxford 2007–2011)Google Scholar, vol. 2, ed. Tony Waldron, 33. For the purposes of my sample I have included only phases C–E of the Barton-upon-Humber and excluded skeletons in the B/C phase (1300–1700) because some may be postmedieval.

65 Connell et al., A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital, 14.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 228–29. While one might expect the Great Famine of the early fourteenth century to result in a higher number of burials, the largest mass burials at Spitalfields have been dated to ca. 1235 to 1255.

68 DeWitte, “The Effect of Sex on Risk of Mortality.”

69 Daniell, Death and Burial, 99.

70 Mirk, John, Mirk's Festial: A Collection of Homilies, ed. Erbe, Theodore (London, 1905), 298Google Scholar.

71 Daniell, Death and Burial, 127–28; Roberts, Charlotte and Cox, Margaret, Health and Disease in Britain: From Prehistory to the Present Day (Stroud, 2003), 253–54Google Scholar.

72 Because part of the infirmary's charge was to house pregnant women, one would expect that its authorities would be familiar with burial guidelines, highlighting the gap between rules and practice. See Connell et al., A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital, 211.

73 Carolly Erickson asserts that a woman without being purified was buried in unconsecrated ground and barred from paradise, because the afterbirth blood was thought to attract demons. The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, 196. Her source, however, is not clear. Erickson's assertion is repeated by Gibson, Gail McMurray, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), 61Google Scholar. Indirect evidence for a practice of excluding unchurched mothers might be inferred from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century synodal statutes from Cambrai and Tournai, which insist that unchurched mothers of stillborn infants should be buried in the churchyard because “we ought not to turn her pain into a fault.” But if this practice indeed existed, I have not found evidence of it in England.

74 Church statutes also sometimes excluded priests' concubines and (in thirteenth-century London) those who married without publication of banns. It is unclear, however, that these exclusions were consistently enforced (Daniell, Death and Burial, 104). Heretics and suicides may have been buried at crossroads outside towns, although it is hard to know how often this happened in practice during the late Middle Ages (cases have, however, been documented for the Anglo-Saxon and postmedieval eras): Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 72; Reynolds, Andrew, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar; Clarke, B., “An Early Anglo-Saxon Cross-roads Burial from Broadtown, North Wiltshire,” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 97 (2004): 89–94Google Scholar. I thank Robin Fleming for alerting me to the Anglo-Saxon crossroads tradition. Executed criminals were buried in parish and hospital cemeteries, although their bodies were sometimes buried facedown with their wrists tied behind their back. Indeed, one large parish cemetery—that of St. Margaret in Combusto, Norwich—has not been included in my sample of parish and local cemeteries because it was known to have housed executed felons as well as parishioners, which presumably explains the distorted sex ratio (283 males and 67 females, or 422 men for every 100 women among sexable adults): Stirland, Ann, “Patterns of Trauma in a Unique Medieval Parish Cemetery,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 6, no. 1 (January 1996): 92–100Google Scholar.

75 Nor does it seem likely that gender divisions within cemeteries can account for the differences. Although many cemeteries have been excavated only in part, the prospect that almost every one of these would focus on the part of the cemetery that happened to contain more male than female burials seems most unlikely. Still, some archaeologists have considered this possibility, if only to reject it. As Mays notes for Wharram Percy, for instance, “Given that there is no evidence for spatial segregation of burials with regard to sex, it seems unlikely that the ‘missing’ females are lurking in a cluster in some unexcavated part of the burial area.” Mays et al., The Churchyard, 91.

76 Daniell, Death and Burial, 18–19.

77 However, the ratio of men to women at leper hospitals located outside town walls is closer to even than those located in the middle of towns, and in a number of smaller leper hospital cemeteries, women outnumber men (Gilchrist and Sloane, Requiem, 205–07.). As discussed above, the graveyard of St. Mary Spital includes skeletons of 1,883 women and 2,237 men among its sexable adults.

78 Several studies have traced the popularity of various burial sites among the gentry, nobility, clergy, and wealthier townspeople. See, for instance, Postles, David, “Monastic Burials of Non-patronal Lay Benefactors,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47, no. 4 (October 1996): 621–37Google Scholar; Harding, Vanessa, “Burial Choice and Location in Later Medieval London,” in Death in Towns, 119–35Google Scholar.

79 Ortner, Donald J., “Male-Female Immune Reactivity and Its Implications for Interpreting Evidence in Human Skeletal Paleopathology,” in Sex and Gender in Paleopathological Perspective, ed. Grauer, Anne L. and Stuart-Macadam, Patricia (Cambridge, 1998), 79–92Google Scholar. Evidence of each of these has been found in medieval skeletons.

80 The average longevity gap of the fifteen countries with the lowest overall life expectancies at birth (52 years or fewer) was 1.68 years in favor of women, and in four of these fifteen countries men actually outlived women. By contrast, in the European Union countries, women outlived men by an average of 5.85 years; in Japan, 6.86 years; and in the United States, 5.0 years. All data is from 2012 estimates and was last accessed 11 February 2013 at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html .

81 Johansson, Sheila Ryan, “Deferred Infanticide: Excess Female Mortality during Childhood,” in Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, ed. Hausfater, Glenn and Hardy, Sarah Blaffer (New York, 1984), 463–85Google Scholar.

82 Hatcher calculated life expectancy at 20 and at 25, and predicted from life tables that expectancy at birth was around 20.44 years. Hatcher, “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century: Some New Evidence,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39, no. 1 (February 1986): 19–38Google Scholar. Harvey interpreted life expectancy at birth from Hatcher's figures as 21 to 23, and added her own assessment of life expectancy from age 20 on the basis of Westminster data. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford, 1993), 114–29Google Scholar. The latest data from Durham Priory fits the Canterbury and Westminster data remarkably well: Hatcher, Piper, and Stone, “Monastic Mortality.”

83 For discussion of various estimates of life expectancy, see Loschky, David and Childers, Ben D., “Early English Mortality,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 1 (Summer 1993): 85–97Google Scholar. For a recent and highly technical assessment of life expectancies among tenants-in-chief, see Jonker, M. A., “Estimation of Life Expectancy in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. A (Statistics in Society) 166, no. 1 (2003): 105–17Google Scholar.

84 Hallam, H. E., “Age at First Marriage and Age at Death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252–1478,” Population Studies 39, no. 1 (1985): 55–69Google Scholar. M. M. Postan and J. Titow used heriot data from manorial court rolls to estimate crude death rates of male peasants but derived figures so high that they are not taken seriously. “Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 11, no. 3 (1959): 392–417Google Scholar. Zvi Razi's estimate of a life expectancy at birth of about 25 years for preplague male tenants is considered more realistic, although his assumptions about age of inheritance have been challenged. Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society, and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), 34–45Google Scholar. For critiques of his methodology, see Poos, L. R. and Smith, Richard M., “‘Legal Windows onto Historical Populations?’ Recent Research on Demography and the Manor Court in Medieval England,” Law and History Review 2, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 141–42Google Scholar. Poos has estimated higher life expectancies among postplague male peasants in Essex of about 32–34 years using intervals between tithing entry (at age 12) and death, but is careful to emphasize that his data excludes infant and early childhood mortality. He suggests on the basis of early modern data that women's life expectancy may have been higher. A Rural Society after the Black Death, 115–19.

85 Cullum, P. H., Cremetts and Corrodies: Care of the Poor and Sick at St Leonard's Hospital, York, in the Middle Ages (York, 1991), 17, 20–21Google Scholar; Shaw, David Gary, The Creation of a Community: The City of Wells in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), 242–43Google Scholar.

86 Archaeologists are still standardizing the ways in which they assess and record skeletal data relating to age. Indeed, this is a topic of considerable frustration for some who would like to see more uniform and reliable practices. As Simon Mays notes, “At present, the lack of a wholly satisfactory technique for estimating age at death in adult skeletons from archaeological sites is one of the thorniest problems facing human osteoarchaeology” (The Archaeology of Human Bones, 59). For discussion of various methods for assessing age, see Mays, The Archaeology of Human Bones, 50–76. When recording and grouping age cohorts, some archaeologists assign each skeleton to a five-year cohort, others to a ten-year cohort, and others still to more general categories like “young adult,” “middle aged adult,” and “old adult.”

87 The Black Death cemetery of East Smithfield is omitted, because the age profile reflects its status as a catastrophic rather than an attritional burial ground. The forty-five burials from Ormesby St. Margaret have also been omitted: the archaeological report used descriptive age categories (“young,” “middle-aged,” and “old”) with overlaps between them, and it was not clear how these correlated with more standard age cohorts. Moreover, it has been suggested that young men may have died elsewhere, perhaps as sailors or soldiers, so that the age profile is not representative. Wallis with Anderson, A Medieval Cemetery at Mill Lane, 14.

88 See note 4 from table 4 above.

89 Connell et al., A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital, 28, table 9.

90 Ibid., 212.

91 The database compiled by Gilchrist and Sloane may be searched online at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?cemeteries_ahrb_2005 (last accessed 11 February 2013).

92 Hallam, , “Age at First Marriage and Age at Death.” Cemetery data is cited in Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Medieval Demographic System of the Nordic Countries (Oslo, 1993), 56–75Google Scholar.

93 Sara M. Butler is adamant that infanticide was taken seriously by the courts and that few prosecutions thus represent few infanticides. Butler, “A Case of Indifference? Child Murder in Later Medieval England,” Journal of Women's History 19, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 59–82Google Scholar. Others do not rule out the possibility that infanticides were more common but undetected by the courts. See, e.g., Kellum, Barbara, “Infanticide in England in the Later Middle Ages,” History of Childhood Quarterly 1, no. 1 (Winter 1974): 367–88Google Scholar; Hanawalt, Barbara A., Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, 1979), 156Google Scholar, and The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford, 2007), 27–34Google Scholar.

94 Mays, Simon, “Infanticide in Roman Britain,” Antiquity 67, no. 257 (December 1993): 883–88Google Scholar. See also Mays et al., The Churchyard, 89–90.

95 At St. Mary Spital, the gap is smaller: 57.2 percent of ageable adult male skeletons and 62.8 percent of ageable adult female skeletons are from the 18–35 range.

96 In sub-Saharan Africa (all countries combined), the lifetime risk is 1 in 31 (3.2 percent), but this risk is intensified by the prevalence of AIDS and the early age at which women begin having babies (many in their teens), neither of which were factors that medieval English women had to contend with. In modern South Asia, the risk is 1 in 120 (0.8 percent). World Health Organization, Trends in Maternal Mortality, 1990–2008 (n.p., 2010), 18, available online at http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2010/9789241500265_eng.pdf (last accessed 11 February 2013); Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 277. Roger Schofield has also pointed out that maternal mortality may not have accounted for as many deaths as previously supposed in the early modern era. Schofield, “Did the Mothers Really Die? Three Centuries of Maternal Mortality in ‘The World We Have Lost,’” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure; Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Bonfield, Lloyd, Smith, Richard M., and Wrightson, Keith (Oxford, 1986), 231–60Google Scholar.

97 These statistics are based on data downloaded from Gilchrist and Sloane's database at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?cemeteries_ahrb_2005 (last accessed 11 February 2013). In each case, it is possible that some of these skeletons were of laypeople buried in monasteries, but most were nuns and monks.

98 Patricia Stuart-Macadam, “Iron Deficiency Anemia: Exploring the Difference,” in Sex and Gender in Paleopathological Perspective, 57.

99 Pearson, Kathy L., “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet,” Speculum 72, no. 1 (January 1997): 15, 30Google Scholar.

100 Mate, Mavis E., Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, 1998), 149Google Scholar.

101 Cullum, Cremetts and Corrodies, 17.

102 Gundula Müldner and Richards, Michael P., “Diet and Diversity at Later Medieval Fishergate: The Isotopic Evidence,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 134, no. 2 (October 2007): 162–74Google Scholar.

103 Richards, M. P., Mays, S., and Fuller, B. T., “Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Values of Bone and Teeth Reflect Weaning Age at the Medieval Wharram Percy Site, Yorkshire, UK,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 119, no. 3 (November 2002): 205–10Google Scholar.

104 Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), 81Google Scholar.

105 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1987), 155Google Scholar.

106 See, for instance, Chen, Lincoln C. et al. , “Sex Bias in the Family Allocation of Food and Health Care in Rural Bangladesh,” Population and Development Review 7, no. 1 (March 1981): 55–70Google Scholar.

107 Hanawalt, Barbara A., The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), 171–87Google Scholar.

108 Connell et al. , A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital, 109, 154–56Google Scholar.

109 Ibid., 155.

110 Ibid., 110–11, 155.

111 Ibid., 155.

112 I owe to Kit French the suggestion that vitamin D deficiency may have affected women's health disproportionately. For a summary of the effects of vitamin D deficiency, see “Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Vitamin D,” Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, last updated 24 June 2011, http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-QuickFacts/ (last accessed 11 February 2013).

113 Mays et al., The Churchyard, 176–77; Robert and Cox, Health and Disease in Britain, 247–48. At St. Mary Spital, evidence of childhood-onset vitamin D deficiency was found in five children, two men, and one woman. Another woman showed signs of adult-onset vitamin D deficiency (osteomalacia): Connell et al., A Bioarchaeological Study of Medieval Burials on the Site of St. Mary Spital, 119–20.

114 Brickley, M. et al. , “Skeletal Manifestations of Vitamin D Deficiency Osteomalacia in Documented Historical Collections,” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 15, no. 6 (November/December 2005): 389–403Google Scholar.

115 Russell, British Medieval Population, 149; Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London, 58; Hatcher, “Mortality in the Fifteenth Century”; Harvey, Living and Dying in England; Hatcher, Piper, and Stone, “Monastic Mortality.”

116 There is a very large body of scholarship on the cultural effects of distorted sex ratios. For one of many recent examples, see Barber, Nigel, “The Sex Ratio as a Predictor of Cross-National Variation in Violent Crime,” Cross-Cultural Research 34, no. 3 (August 2000): 264–82Google Scholar. Some scholars have sought to apply these theories to historic populations. See, for instance, Gottschall, Jonathan, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Sharon Wright for alerting me to this book and to the broader anthropological literature.

117 I calculated these numbers by taking population estimates for each 25 years between 1025 and 1500 from Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 71, and from table A11.3 of the appendix to the working paper by Stephen N. Broadberry et al., “British Economic Growth, 1270–1870: An Output-Based Approach,” 50 (available online at http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/pdf/Broadberry/BritishGDPappendix.pdf). Where data is lacking, as it is for many years, I estimated the total population by assuming a constant rate of growth or decline between years on either side. I then calculated the “missing women” first if men outnumbered women by 110:100 and then if they outnumbered women by 115:100. Using Hatcher's data with this method, 2.65 million women were “missing” if women were outnumbered 110:100, and 3.89 million were outnumbered with a sex ratio of 115:100. The data from Broadberry et al. resulted in slightly lower numbers of women “missing”: 2.57 million women with a sex ratio of 110:100 and 3.79 million with a ratio of 115:100.

118 The number of those executed for witchcraft in England forms an historiographical debate of its own, but most would agree that executions totaled no more than 1,000. See Sharpe, James, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750 (London, 1996), 125Google Scholar.

119 In these calculations, I am using data from 1377 as estimated in Broadberry et al., “British Economic Growth, 1270–1870: An Output-Based Approach,” appendix, 50, and assuming a total population of about 2.5 million (hence 119,048 to 174,419 “missing women”). For clergy estimates, see Lepine, “England: Church and Clergy.” For town sizes, see Dyer, Alan, “Appendix: Ranking Lists of English Medieval Towns,” in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Palliser, D. M., Clarke, Peter, and Daunton, Martin, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2000–01), 1:758–60Google Scholar.