Twelve Men Swore They Remembered Your Birth. Many Were Lying.

Описание: Before 1538, England had no birth registration. When a young man turned up at court claiming he was old enough to inherit his father's land, there was nothing to check him against.

So the law gathered twelve men who had known him his whole life, put them on oath, and made each one give his reason. One dated a baptism by a comet. Another by a peace-making meeting held at Honiton. A third because his own sister was married that month.

About 5,000 of those answers survive. Read enough of them and the same handful of reasons start coming back, in different counties and different years, attached to different births.

0:00 Three questions
1:13 The day nobody wrote down
2:40 Twenty-one, or fourteen
4:45 Prove it
6:12 Five thousand memories
7:55 The identical dozen
9:48 Socially credible
11:08 What they had instead

SOURCES

Mapping the Medieval Countryside (AHRC), on inquisitions post mortem and proofs of age: inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk

Joel Rosenthal, Social Memory in Late Medieval England: Village Life and Proofs of Age (Palgrave Macmillan). The count of 414 proofs from 1377 to 1447, and the roughly 5,000 memories inside them.

The Medieval Review 19.05.03, reviewing Rosenthal, for the line about a jury's dozen memories being "virtually identical, the first juror's testimony aped by the eleven others".

Matthew Holford, in The Later Medieval Inquisitions Post Mortem (Boydell), on testimony that is "to some extent fictitious".

Kent Archaeological Society, Inquisitiones Post Mortem, on tenure and the writ de aetate probanda.

Thomas Cromwell's injunction of 5 September 1538, which begins parish registration in England.

On the ages: 21 for land held by knight service, 14 for socage, and 14 or 16 for an heiress depending on whether she was already married. Bracton puts socage at fifteen in particular cases, and the lawyers never settled it.