Late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English ‘proof of age’ records provide an intriguing glimpse into the often complex interactions of gender, time and memory in medieval society, revealing how women’s stories helped to create and shape the collective memory of medieval communities – something also posited by Patricia Skinner in the first essay in this volume. These documents record the statements of male jurors regarding the age of an heir to lands held directly from the crown, requiring the men to recall events anywhere from fourteen to twenty-one years in the past. On the surface, men, as the members of the community who were recognized as viable witnesses and whose words were recorded in Latin prose by male royal officials – women could not serve as jurors – were situated as the holders and creators of community memory. In fact, though, throughout their depositions, men continually referred to the words, activities, experiences and memories of women in their community – wives, kin and neighbours. This was particularly true of men’s recollections of births, which were frequently called upon to establish the age of an heir. Thus these sources serve as a reminder, as Elisabeth van Houts has suggested, of how often women’s stories lurk beneath the surface of what appear to be documents written from an exclusively masculine perspective.

This essay focuses on how memories of birth, as recorded in proofs of age, were socially constructed by both male and female members of medieval communities. The memories that were recorded in the individual depositions of jurors were rarely the product of an individual alone, but most often the result of the intricate workings of the collective memory of the community, consisting of numerous social interactions and conversations within the community. While men were very much part of the rich tapestry of social interactions surrounding birth, their memories of births in the community also reflected the stories of women who attended births and took part in more exclusively female rituals.

Proofs of age, part of the Inquisitions Post Mortem, are records of inquests into the age of heirs to lands held directly from the king. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although the lands of important families were usually passed on through inheritance, most were technically held from the king in return for specified services.