I'm a newlywed medieval French (male, France proper) farmer. In the aftermath of my wedding, what do I *do*? Do I move out of my parents' home and if I do, how do I amass the capital, labor, or expertise required to build or purchase a new house for me and my wife?

by Xxxn00bpwnR69xxX
one_esk_nineteen

First of all, you're probably not that young. According to the famously widespread European Marriage Pattern, theorized by John Hajnal in 1965, you would probably be around your mid-twenties. Very early marriage, like that permitted by canon law (12 years for girls, irrc), was not usual.

The problem with knowing where a newlywed medieval French (or Western-European) peasant couple would have lived after marriage rests with the sources used for ascertaining this: reliable population enumerations, similar to modern censuses, that list individuals living in each household for a specific locality, and the relationships between the individuals are very scarce. Still, rule of thumb for medieval England for instance are stem-families, in which, if you are the first born, you continue to live with your parents after marriage. Very big households, with many families (more than 2 actually) would have been extremely uncommon (household typology discounts servants or other lodgers, only counts related conjugal units).

For France this depends on where you are located: in the North, inheritance would have been regulated by customary law, whereas the South of France succession was determined mainly by written Roman civil law (Justinian's codes). The problem is that these two broad regimes were split into a very complex mosaic of subsidiary inheritance practices, a matter that would affect a newly-wed couple directly: if you were living in an area where inheritance - land included - was partible between siblings, then you could in theory get the land and necessary funds for building a small home early on in life, which would hasten your prospective marriage. If it was impartible, then you inherited no lands, and basically had to make a living either by hiring yourself out as a farm laborer to other larger households (a very common life experience), until you could accumulate the necessary material - and possibly social - capital to appear as an attractive partner. If coming from a wealthier family, go to the city and learn a trade (apprenticeships cost money). You would also have had a local stonemason (and a guild, if this was a larger village), carpenter, etc. and so on, who could have helped with building the house itself. But the house was generally less important than the land it stood on, and its status.

The literature on household organisation and inheritance is cumbersome and not really enticing to a non-specialist, so I hesitate to recommend anything right now. Perhaps you might like to look through Emmanuel Todd's works (which lean more into the sociological side of inheritance regimes), or you can look through things like this, which gives a more general overview of various social historical matters tied to family, household formation,and inheritance