Eileen
Power, the eldest daughter of a stockbroker, was born at Atrincham
in 1899. She was educated at Oxford High School for Girls, Girton
College and the Sorbonne. A critic of Britain's foreign policy,
Power was an active member of the Union of Democratic
Control.
Power
was Director of Studies in History at Girton
College (1913-21) and Lecturer in Political Science at the London
School of Economics (1921-24) and Reader of the University
of London (1924-31).
Power's
books include The Paycockes of Coggeshall
(1919), Medieval English Nunneries
(1922), Medieval People (1924),
The Goodman of Paris (1928) and
Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century
(1933). In 1927 Power founded the Economic
History Review.
In 1931 Power became Professor of Economic History at the London
School of Economics. Two years later she joined William
Beveridge in establishing the Academic Freedom Committee, an organization
that helped academics fleeing from Nazi
Germany.
Power
married
the historian Michael Postan in 1937. The following year she became
Professor of Economic History at Cambridge
University.
Eileen
Power died of heart failure in 1940. Her book, The
Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941) was published
posthumously. A
collection of her lectures, Medieval Women,
was published in 1975.
(1)
Dora Russell was one of Eileen Power's
students at Girton College.
Eileen Power dealt with history. She became distinguished for her
fine scholarship and her utter charm, which captivated many of both
sexes. We always found it a pleasure to watch her, tall and placid
and very much a personality, as she came in to take her place for
dinner at high table. She had very beautiful, candid blue-grey eyes.
(2)
Kingsley Martin taught with Eileen Power
at the London School of Economics.
In the autumn of 1924 I started work at the London School of Economics.
Sir William Beveridge was director when I joined the staff in 1924.
He accepted me first on a part-time basis. I never hit it off with
Beveridge, though I recognised from the beginning that he was a man
of extraordinary ability. I once, and only once, pleased Beveridge.
I said that he "ruled over an empire on which the concrete never
set". He was so delighted with this remark that he constantly
quoted it, always attributing it, however, to Eileen Power, with whom,
like everyone else, I assume was more or less in love. Eileen, indeed,
was one of the most attractive women I have ever known. She was good-looking,
and carried her erudition as a medieval scholar with wit and grace.
She wrote delightfully, her account of the domestic life of nunneries
would never bore anyone, and her Medieval People showed that
careful scholarship can be made popular and achieve large sales.
We used to speculate on whether she would marry; on the whole the
betting was that an air ace would carry her off her feet, but in the
end it was the excellent historian, Michael Postan, on whom the choice
fell. There was no one who did not deeply regret her loss when she
died suddenly of heart failure.
(3)
Eileen Power, Medieval
People (1924)
Social history sometimes suffers from the reproach that
it is vague and general, unable to compete with the attractions of
political history either for the student or for the general reader,
because of its lack of outstanding personalities. In point of fact
there is often as much material for reconstructing the life of some
quite ordinary person as there is for writing a history of Robert
of Normandy or of Philippa of Hainault; and the lives of ordinary
people so reconstructed are, if less spectacular, certainly not less
interesting. I believe that social history lends itself particularly
to what may be called a personal treatment, and that the past may
be made to live again for the general reader more effectively by personifying
it than by presenting it in the form of learned treatises on the development
of the manor or on medieval trade, essential as these are to the specialist.
For history, after all, is valuable only in so far as it lives, and
Maeterlinck's cry, 'There are no dead,' should always be the historian's
motto. It is the idea that history is about the dead, or, worse still,
about movements and conditions which seem but vaguely related to the
labours and passions of flesh and blood, which has driven history
from bookshelves where the historical novel still finds a welcome
place.
(4)
Eileen Power, Medieval
People (1924)
The great and noble trade of cloth-making has left many traces upon
the life of England, architectural, literary, and social. It has filled
our countryside with magnificent Perpendicular churches and gracious
oak-beamed houses. It has filled our popular literature with old wives'
tales of the worthies of England, in which the clothiers Thomas of
Reading and Jack of Newbury rub elbows with Friar Bacon and Robin
Hood. It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, as Defoe observed,
in the early eighteenth century "many of the great families who
now pass for gentry in the western counties have been originally raised
from and built up by this truly noble manufacture". It has filled
our census lists with surnames - Weaver, Webber, Webb, Sherman, Fuller,
Walker, Dyer - and given to every unmarried woman the designation
of a spinster. And from the time when the cloth trade ousted that
of wool as the chief export trade of England down to the time when
it was in its turn ousted by iron and cotton, it was the foundation
of England's commercial greatness.
(5)
Eileen Power, Medieval
Women (1975)
What exactly did the nuns teach children? This is a difficult question
to answer: difficult because contemporary evidence is scarce, and
because the value of education varied greatly from age to age, and
also with the intellectual level of the nuns themselves. Generally
speaking in the early centuries of the Middle Ages the intellectual
standards at many houses were quite high. But in the later centuries
the education of the nuns themselves grew progressively worse, and
Latin died out of most convents in the fourteenth century and French
in the fifteenth century.
Modem writers
have tried to make up for lack of direct evidence by drawing up imaginary
curricula, and they grew more and more ambitious as they copied the
curricula from each other. In the seventeenth century, Aubrey says
"here they learned needlework, art of confectionary, surgery,
physic, writing, drawing etc." But in the work of a writer of
the mid-nineteenth century the list becomes, "reading, writing,
some knowledge of arithmetic, art of embroidery, music and French
..., preparation of perfumes, balsams, simples and confectionary".
Another writer adds a few more touches, "treatment of various
disorders, compounding of simples, binding up of wounds, fancy cookery
such as making of sweetmeats, drawing, needlework of all kinds and
music both vocal and instrumental". Students of human nature
cannot but smile to see music creep into the list and become both
instrumental and vocal. Confectionary extends itself to include perfumes,
balsams, simples and sweetmeats; arithmetic appears out of nowhere,
and even dancing trips in on light fantastic toe! In Malory, there
is a passage where it is said of Arthur's fairy sister, who bewitched
Merlin, that "she was put to school in a nunnery and there she
learned so much that she was a great clerk
of necromancy". This would add black magic to the curriculum
of nunnery schools!
The sober fact is we have
no evidence about what was taught except inferences from what we know
of the education of nuns themselves. Latin could not have been taught
in the fourteenth century or French in the fifteenth century since
nuns themselves did not know these languages in those times. Children
were doubtless taught the Credo, the Ave and the Paternoster by rote,
and must have been taught to read, although it is more doubtful whether
they learned to write. Probably, they learned songs with the nuns,
and spinning and needlework. Beyond these accomplishments nuns doubtless
taught piety and good breeding; and the standard of these, though
good in some houses, could not have been very high in others, judging
from the visitation reports.
(5)
Eileen Power, Medieval
Women (1975)
Much less prominent in medieval sources, perhaps because it was taken
for granted, was
the largest class of working women, peasants and dwellers on all manors
scattered up and down England. But adequate evidence for reaching
a judgement about their role exists nonetheless, and will surprise
us.
Most of them were expected,
if they were married, to share in all their husband's labours on the
family holdings. In addition, they were burdened with chores which
were traditionally feminine. The keeping of the house was of course
one of them, the making of cloths and clothes (both for own use and
for sale) was another. When Helmbrecht, an ambitious peasant hero
of a famous German poem, tried to persuade his sister Gotelinde to
flee the house of her peasant parents and marry a man who would enable
her to lead the life of a lady, he reminds her of what her life would
otherwise be: "You will never be more wretched than if you marry
a peasant. You will be compelled to spin, to scour the flax, to combe
the hemp, wash and wring clothes, dig up the beets." Helmbrecht's
list of the tasks which life imposed on a peasant wife was of course
too short. For instance, it says nothing of the strenuous hours and
weeks which a working wife was called upon to spend by their husband's
side in fields and pastures.
These tasks weighed no
less, often even more, on women who, whether married or not, possessed
holdings in their own names - mostly widows or unmarried women. This
was perhaps the most hardworked class of all. In every manorial survey
one will find a certain number of women as free tenants, villeins
or cotters, holding their virgate of few acres like men and liable
to pay the same services for them - so many days' labour a week perhaps,
so many boon services at sowing or harvest, so many cartings, so many
eggs or pullets or pence per year. No doubt they hired men for heavy
ploughing but probably performed other services in person.
We find in manorial accounts
women hired by the bailiff to do all sorts of agricultural labour.
In fact there was hardly any work except ploughing for which they
were not engaged, e.g. planting peas and beans, weeding, repairing,
reaping, binding, threshing, winnowing, thatching. It appears they
did much of the sheep shearing. Even work as a blacksmith, a skill
one might have thought exclusively male, is shown in some French images.
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