You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. Indeed, only widows and other elderly unattached women outranked such boys. After , moreover, the city included the Hospital of St.
The city itself provided for its orphans by having the provost make arrangements for their care and for their practical training for adult work 4 , and individuals provided for widows, poor school boys and poor marriageable girls in their testaments.
In the goldsmiths-whose members were unlikely to suffer economic hardship anyway-built a hospice for older members of the gild and their widows 8. Moreover, in the squirrel, or vair, curriers established a mutual aid society, which provided members with 3 sous per week during periods of illness. This was, however, a form of insurance rather than a form of charity: those who desired the benefits of the society paid 10 sous as an entrance fee and one denier each week after that 9.
Demographic data from the late middle ages indicate that while a large number of widowed and older women headed their own households, older male heads of household living alone were extremely rare Three of those four mature women, moreover, were single or widowed. But was the fit really so neat? This question has to be answered in two parts β one for men in need, one for women. In this paper, I will focus on men in need β and most especially, on young men in need.
A young man named Louis, who was deaf and mute from a very early age, trained from the age of eight in the workshop of a smith on a rural estate. Thomas de Voudai became blind when he was 12 years old and already watching pigs for the people of his village. Moriset, also a young swineherd, became lame at some point early in his working life. Guillot de Caux, a migrant to Paris, was presumably working when he began to suffer from a paralysis at the age of Jehan de La Haye began to suffer from dizzy spells and muscular failure while he was migrating to Paris, also at the age of 18, in order to find work.
