What is family in an age of plague? The Liber Lynne and the urban family in late medieval England

The Liber Lynne, a fifteenth-century manuscript in the archive of the corporation of London, is a puzzle. Catalogued among the city of London’s collections of written custom (formerly Guildhall MS Cust. 15), it is generally defined as a cartulary. In this article, I study the Liber Lynne as a family book, which was both about family and for family. The chance survival of the book, a consequence of its acquisition by the Hanseatic Steelyard in London before the end of the fifteenth century, offers an unusual opportunity to explore the concept of family in the medieval English town. I situate the Liber Lynne in a distinct place and time. I argue that the book is a distinctively urban manuscript, the outcome of urban interests, ambitions, and anxieties. The book also reveals the persistent and ubiquitous presence of plague, which exposed the fragility and precarity of families, but which helped to give different shapes to families. These shapes, or structures, were fluid because of the mutable nature of ideas about family and the voluntaristic qualities of family. Family, the Liber Lynne suggests, was a choice and a practice.