English Rural Society, 1200-1350

J. Z. Titow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351625715
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This title, first published in 1969, is concerned with historic documents and their uses, and with a discussion of living standards among the peasants, as it is the author's belief that any worthwhile discussion is impossible without an understanding of the sources and their limitations. With its emphasis on the controversial and debateable, this book is admirable proof that a study of medieval history is not merely a matter of memorising facts.

1

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Introductory:
Sources and Problems

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1

It is a well known fact that the population of England in the thirteenth century was predominantly rural and that rural population was predominantly peasant, yet a student of the rural society approaching the period for the first time may well wonder why it is that most of the studies he comes across deal mainly, if not exclusively, with great estates and their owners. The answer to this apparent paradox is a simple one.

In his reconstruction of the past the historian is circumscribed by the existing documentation, and the documents on which our reconstruction of medieval rural society rests emanate almost entirely from the great estates. This is quite understandable. The peasants have left no records behind. Even had they been literate, as most of them certainly were not, they would have found no need to keep a record of their activities; even had some of them managed to keep such records, their chances of survival would have been almost nil from the start. It is the great landlords, with estates too vast to be administered by them personally, who were in need of written records, who would have found the expenditure involved justified, and who would have taken steps to ensure that such records were kept and preserved. The extent to which such records were drawn up and preserved, and the amount of detail included in them, depended primarily on the degree to which the landlords themselves were involved in the administration of their estates. The thirteenth century was, as will be explained presently, a period of renewed interest on the part of the landlords in the exploitation of their estates, and this accounts for the fact that a vast volume of records was produced in this period.

The need to keep records would be greatest, and the chances of dispersal for estates, and documents, the least, when the landlord was an institution; this is particularly true of ecclesiastical (episcopal or monastic) landlords, for they did not, after all, have to provide for younger sons, nor find dowries for marriageable daughters, nor set aside portions for widows, nor could they die out in direct line as so many great lay families have done. But it is not only this permanence and continuity built into ecclesiastical ownership of land which is behind the survival of so many collections of documents of ecclesiastical estates; ecclesiastical landlords had also at their command the necessary skill for their creation and preservation. In medieval times the clerics were the only literate class in society, and ecclesiastical landlords had a vast army of clerics to draw upon in the administration of their estates. This is probably the main reason why documents of lay estates are frequently inferior to those of ecclesiastical ones, both in content and presentation. It is quite inconceivable, for instance, that an ecclesiastical landlord in the early fourteenth century, when preparing an extent of his estates, would have accepted a return that the ‘demesne lands were not evaluated because they have not been measured’, as did the landlord of a small lay estate in Nottinghamshire as late as 1324 (Doc. 6).

There is another important reason why studies of rural society and economy usually centre on the great estates. In spite of the myth which dies incredibly hard, medieval agrarian economy was not self-sufficient, self-contained, or ‘natural’.¹ It was, of course, localized to a much greater extent than is the case nowadays, but it was influenced by many external factors of more than local character. Population changes could send prices up or down; disturbances of international trade could alter the balance of profitability between arable and sheep farming; plagues, famines, and epidemics could profoundly affect land values and wage levels. Over all such factors neither the lords nor the peasants had any real control, but the lords had the freedom, which the peasants frequently had not, to trim their sails to the wind of change. It is through the study of changes in their policies with regard to their estates that we can get at these broader economic influences and through them arrive at an understanding of why men behaved as they did.

Finally, the great estates were an integral, and a very important, part of the rural scene. Though peasant farming, speaking quantitatively, was much more important than landlord farming, (i.e. the area under peasant cultivation was much greater than the area in demesne cultivation), in one sense the great estates were the more important, for it was within the framework of the estate that the peasant cultivators operated. This is what historians mean when they talk of the manorial system.

How far back the institution of the manor goes is still debatable. The argument hinges on what one understands by the term; whether one sees the manor as a primarily legal, or primarily economic, entity—if the latter, as I incline to do, then one must agree with Dr Aston² that it is clearly a pre-Conquest institution. This is not the place to discuss the origins of the manor in England, nor the process of evolution whereby England came to be covered by manors; readers interested in this aspect of the problem are referred to Maitland, Round, Vinogradoff, Lennard, Aston, and Kosminsky.³ But a few words of explanation must be said about manors and manorialism in general.

After the Conquest all land in England was held in estates; the lowest unit of estate administration in all its aspects—territorial, economic, and juridical—was the manor. In practice, manorial structure itself, and the degree of manorial control over the rural population, differed considerably as between different areas. It could be almost completely nominal in some areas, as for example, in those parts of the Danelaw where large concentrations of free tenants, called sokemen, existed—tenants whose only link with the manor to which they belonged was that they paid their rents there and owed their lord suit of court. Such concentrations of sokemen, known as territorial sokes, frequently lay miles away from the manorial centre to which they were attached.⁴ Manorial control would also be weak in regions where scattered homesteads and isolated hamlets predominated,⁵ and it was at its strongest in the nucleated villages of the Midlands, the South, and the West.

What made the manorial control a purely nominal link with an estate, or an all-pervading influence over the peasants’ daily life, was the extent to which the manor had developed and retained its demesne (i.e. the home-farm retained by the landlord in direct cultivation) and the degree of interest in the direct exploitation of it on the part of the landlord.

To say that the manor was the lowest unit of estate organization does not, of course, mean that it had to be small; some manors were very large indeed, including a number of villages within their bounds (e.g. the bishop of Winchester’s Somerset manor of Taunton, or his Berkshire manor of Wargrave), while others consisted only of a part of a village, or settlement, and were hardly bigger than a substantial tenant’s holding. What made the difference between a small manor and a substantial holding was not the size but the way in which the land was held. Landed property⁶ to be a manor had to be held as a manor.

There is no need to enter here into what is, to my mind, the somewhat sterile discussion of what constitutes a manor. I still think that essentially a manor is what the old ‘classical’ definition of it said it was: an estate comprising four essential elements—the demesne, land in the hands of the tenants, dependent peasantry, and the owner’s right of lordship over the inhabitants of the manor. It is true that one can find examples of manors where one of these elements is missing, but in my view such instances represent a peculiar development which does not invalidate the definition of a manor as previously given.

We do find places described as manors in the documents with no demesne on them, but this probably means no more than that the always fluctuating ratio between demesne and tenant land had changed, over the course of time, or through a single letting out, to the complete disappearance of the former. Occasionally, too, existing manors could be broken up into new groupings, some of them without a demesne at all.

We also find manors with only demesne and no tenant land at all, though this is less common than the former case. They could, however, be looked upon as real manors in the sense that though tenants, and thus also lordship, are missing from their actual composition at the time, potentiality for them existed if the person responsible for their creation was already vested with the rights pertaining to manorial lordship in virtue of his possessions elsewhere.

There are also cases on record of individuals who having accumulated considerable landed property began to call them manors and behave towards their own tenants as manorial lords; this occasionally went on long enough to acquire a measure of recognition.⁷ On the whole, however, we must guard against regarding as the lord of a manor every freeholder with tenants of his own, and some land in direct cultivation. Even when the documents speak of land held in demesne this does not necessarily mean manorial demesne; it is simply the usual way of saying that the land is kept in direct cultivation instead of having been let out to tenants. Similarly the mere existence of tenants does not, of itself, create lordship, and where true lordship is lacking there can be no manor. Mere creation of tenancies does not create jurisdictional rights over the tenants; they can only be created by those who have the authority to do so, or delegated by those who already have them. This is why I strongly suspect that in Professor Kosminsky’s classification of manors, many of his ‘manors’ in the ‘small manors’ category are no more than substantial holdings held of somebody else’s manor, and not manors in their own right.⁸

If one is to have proper understanding of the manorial system, and life under it in the thirteenth century, it is essential to look at the traditional manor—the manor with both demesne and tenants—first and foremost, for it is the presence of the demesne which constitutes the raison d’être of the manorial system and which provides the key to the understanding of subsequent developments. This preoccupation with the ‘classical’ manor is more than a theoretically dictated preference; Professor Kosminsky’s study of the Hundred Rolls (the only document allowing this to be done on more than a local scale) has shown that in 1279 the ‘traditional’ manor still was the domina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Introductory: Sources and Problems
• 2 Landlords and Peasants
• 3 The Standard of Living Controversy
• Appendix A The Price of Wheat, 1208-1350
• Appendix B The Price of wheat, oxen, and wool (indices)
• Documents
• Note on Documents
• 1 Account Roll: Downton 1208/9
• 2 Account Roll: Downton 1324/25
• 3 Domesday Book entry for Ardleigh
• 4 Survey of Ardleigh, 1222
• 5 Extent of Littleton 1265/66
• 6 Extent of Hodsock 1324
• 7 Custumal of Palgrave 1357 (Fragment)
• 8 Inquisition Post Mortem of the Lands of John de Longvillers 1297
• 9 Court Roll of Southwik, 1279
• 10 Court Roll of the Hundred of Whorwelsdown 1262
• 11 Court Roll of Brembelshute, 1333
• 12 Court Roll of Brembelshute, 1337
• 13 Summary of Court Fines for Staplegrove in Taunton, 1292
• 14 Provenance of a Holding in Bishop’s Waltham, 1227–1500
• 15 Articles of Enquiry by the Frankpledge
• 16 Account of the Fair of St. Giles, Winchester, 1292
• 17 The 15th of 1225 for the Wiltshire manor of Berwick
• 18 Cost of new assarts at Cowyk (in Downton) and Billingbear (in Wargrave) 1251–1253
• 19 Cost of a new barn at Ivinghoe, 1309/10
• 20 The Provisions of Merton (Section 4), 1236
• Index to Introduction