Some Aspects of Householding in the Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth
There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the law...
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University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository
1988
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| Online Access: | https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/1068 https://repository.law.umich.edu/context/articles/article/2067/viewcontent/Miller_Some_20aspects_done.pdf |
| Summary: | There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and milked in summer in high pasture at shieldings by servants and other household members who slept and ate there during the summer but who were still understood to be attached to the main lowland farm in which other household members lived the entire year. Still, both coresidence and commensalism are a big part of what an Icelandic household was about, but a certain definitional roughness and subjectivity is needed in order to accommodate native categories and conceptions. For the purpose of this study I consider a person's household to be where sjhe eats and sleeps most of the time and where, even when not sleeping or eating there, he or she is perceived to have some right or duty to do so. This kind of looseness will cause trouble in marginal cases, but it is fairly serviceable nevertheless. It also allows for the possibility of multiple-household membership; something the ethnographic evidence suggests should not be totally precluded by definitions all too often adopted, without much refinement from the census taker, and it takes better account of the demands of the native style of pastoralism. Although qualifications and modifications will emerge when we consider the sources, I adopt for convenience the terminology of household type settled on by the Cambridge Group. Households are either simple or complex. A simple household has as its base the conjugal family unit, that is, a married couple ... |
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