The Later Middle Ages in England 1216 - 1485

Bertie Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317873228
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This distinguished historical narrative of the Tudor period considers the major themes of the period: the resoration of order, reformation of the Church andthe opening phase in the development of a new England.

1

ENGLISH SOCIETY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

1. MANOR AND VILL

AT the beginning of the thirteenth century, England was still overwhelmingly rural. Towns were small, forests and open fields predominated outside the wide areas of mountains or moors. Most of the population still lived in manors or vills, strong in community life but weak in resources. Society was hierarchic, dominated by a French-speaking, militaristic aristocracy supported by an illiterate English-speaking peasantry. Life was meagre and insecure, but society was astonishingly creative. The thirteenth century ranks high in the history of the progressive social order of the West.

The dominant idea was of order and gradation, the pattern on earth reflecting the pattern of heaven. Lords were at the apex, securely marked off by rank, power, distinctive speech, wealth and knightly accomplishments. At the bottom were the peasants, free and unfree, looked on by their superiors, laity and clergy alike, without obvious sympathy and sometimes with contempt. In between was a middle class, if we may use this term, consisting of merchants, administrators, and some clergy, which was still too feeble to act either as a buffer or as a link.

The lord's castle was still essentially a place of defence; the manor and vill were a means of community life in which private enterprise was subordinated to the imperative needs of survival. Despite the harsh terms used above, it would be utterly wrong to conceive of this society as entirely organized for exploitation or oppression by the aristocracy, or as quite lacking in the good life. On the contrary, it was the best that men knew under the stringent needs of the age, and it was generally accepted. Mixed in with its brutalities were the warmth and strength of a co-operative existence. Society was mostly poverty-stricken and the span of life was short (so that medieval generations were dominated by young men); but the common outlook was brightened by proximity to nature and harmony with the environment; and most men were comforted, however crass their materialism, by a simple faith in the rightness of the judgment of God. The strong religious sanction did not mean fatalistic acceptance, and the sharply hierarchic order did not prevent individualism at all levels. All estates had obligations as well as rights, though in very different degrees. There is no evidence of widespread unrest in the thirteenth century, and no threat of a Peasants' Revolt. Strange though it may seem, happiness was one of the precious products of what to most moderns seems to be a cruel and illogical ordering of affairs.

This society might have been, but was not, rigid and unprogressive. In fact its very strength created the conditions of change. The thirteenth century had the advantage of the important commercial revolution of the eleventh and twelfth, when a primitive agrarian society had accumulated surplus wealth; and a money economy had made possible the emergence of merchants and towns, and had provided the conditions for a demographic expansion which had a profound influence on every aspect of life.

Throughout the century, agriculture was the staple occupation. There were many kinds, in different parts of England, with agrarian predominating in the flat lands and pastoral in the hilly country of the north and west. In every part, the village or hamlet provided the environment in which most men spent their lives. The society of the southern midlands is much the most familiar to students of history. Here, the ‘typical’ village was nucleated. The houses were grouped together and surrounded by large open fields cultivated on either a two-field or a three-field system, and by the all-important woodland, meadow and waste. In the former system, one field was ploughed and one lay fallow each year: in the latter, one field lay fallow every third year. Beasts were fed in the meadows and forests, and were folded for manure. There was little understanding of the science of agriculture and for many centuries there had been only negligible technological progress. The system only worked in its poverty through common effort: the fields were divided into strips, the proceeds of which were privately owned, but were cultivated cooperatively. The average peasant was either a freeman with access to the king's courts and the protection of the king's law, or a villein who was, in theory at least, a chattel of his lord.

Alongside and frequently coinciding with the village was the manor, the unit through which the lord organized his lands and the cultivation of his demesnes. The manor did not destroy the village community but, rather, used it. But smaller manors, which we may arbitrarily define as those with less than five hundred acres of arable land, did not usually coincide with the village; they represented only a part of it, or perhaps even the sum of several parts of different villages.¹ Though much of the agrarian life was organized through manor courts, presided over by the lord's steward, this was not uni versai. In the Danelaw, for example, the village community normally filled this important role.

By means of the labour which the peasants owed, aided by his own famuli or servants, the lord cultivated his demesne. The proportion of free and villein holdings varied from manor to manor, as did every other feature of manorial life, including the relations between the freeman and the villein. According to strict legal theory, the latter held at the will of the lord; and the statute of Merton gave the lords extensive rights to enclose common lands, protecting only the freeholder's rights. The villein was liable to have his services increased arbitrarily. Bracton laid it down that he was distinguished by the fact that he did not know at night what service his lord might require of him in the morning. The land of the freeman usually carried no labour dues, or only light ones, whilst that of the villein usually carried dues that were moderate to heavy. However, in some instances these may have been due to more extensive holdings.² In any case, labour services frequently had a money value, entered on the records, so that if the lord was agreeable they could be rendered in cash.

Other differences between the freeman and the villein were probably much more resented. The villein was liable to various payments such as the heriot on the death of the head of the household, merchet for permission to marry, and leyrwite for the incontinence of a daughter. The fact that the villein was tied to the soil did not normally seem irksome, for he wanted to keep his land and his local attachment; but it was another sign of his inferiority. According to a thirteenth-century abbot of Burton, the villeins owned nothing but ‘their own bellies’. They could be bought and sold together with the land they held. Bracton equated them with the Roman slaves.

The stigma which resulted is unmistakable. In October 1300 Robert, the son of Christine of Illey, was amerced because he called his neighbours villeins. In 1391 the Commons in parliament petitioned that no bondman be suffered to send his sons to school ‘in order to advance them by clergy’. As late as the end of the fifteenth century, when villeinage was losing its significance in men's eyes, a bondman of the Abbot of Malmesbury could still say, ‘If I might bring [my freedom] about, it would be more joyful to me than any worldly good.’

Villeinage, like the destitution and drudgery which were the lot of all the poorer peasants, was inherited from the dark days when Europe struggled for the very rudiments of an ordered life. Fixity of tenure and hierarchic organization of society both served their purpose, but the more they succeeded the more they were likely to be resented. Much has been made of them as a means of exploitation by the favoured few, but there is a modern reaction which emphasizes the strong and sustaining bonds which united the village community, the tenacity with which most peasants strove to enter or remain part of it, and the sense in all ranks, however tenuous it was in some, that they were united, despite many prophets of gloom, in a successful way of life.¹ On the whole, freemen and villeins lived and worked in one community, and not infrequently intermarried.² In some areas, the freemen and not the villeins might be the poorest people in a village.

The actions of the village community were on a very modest level an exercise in self-government. The manorial court met in theory every three weeks to dispose of the problems of the manor. The lord's steward presided, but he was not a judge in the modern sense, except in the case of offences against the lord. He gave effect to the judgment of the court, arrived at by the suitors who might include villeins as well as freemen. By-laws were a common feature of the life of a manor or vill; they were enacted by the villagers ‘by common consent’. They not only ensured the services exacted by the lord; they were also intended to serve the common interest. They expressed the will of the vicinitas, the whole community of the vill. That this was a force to be reckoned with, humble though it was, is shown by the actions of the villagers of Peatling Magna in 1265. They sided with Simon de Montfort, making a decision on high political matters, and attacked the marshal of the king's household as he was passing through the village. The peasants of a village community, Sir Maurice Powicke has observed, had grasped the idea of the community of the realm; and they had acted as a body in this matter as they were wont to act in other affairs.

Despite the rigidity of his legal bonds, the villein did, in fact, make the beginnings of progress in the thirteenth century. The forces making for change were cumulative and in the end would be irresistible. Towns exercised an ever-increasing attraction; and in England, as in Germany, Stadtluft macht frei. Cultivation for profit and exchange, rather than for subsistence, encouraged a more scientific exploitation of estates; and this could increase the prosperity of peasants as well as of landlords. Both were aided by rising prices. Advantage could be gained from expanding cultivation, including assarts (the clearing of woodland), the draining of marshes like Romney and the Fenland, and the creation of new towns (the bishop of Winchester created six new ones between 1200–55). All this expansion gave opportunity for greater freedom and the acquisition of new land. An example of this is provided by a certain Stephen Puttock at the turn of the century, villein of the prior of Ely on his manor of Sutton, and a great buyer of land. We have records of his purchases in 1300, 1303, 1304, and 1305, 1307, and 1310. He became an important man in the village, holding offices and serving on juries. And what could be achieved by a villein could obviously be achieved by a freeman.

There were other forces working in the peasant's favour. The government began to broaden its claims upon the villein and gave him a certain recognition in return. In a writ of 1225, he was exempted from taxation on the arms to which he had been sworn. In 1230 he was again assessed to arms along with other owners of property. Even though many villeins were stick-armed and fit for little but the hue and cry, it was important that the basis of selection for military service in the local levies was wealth and not status. Similarly the Statute of Winchester of 1285 enacted that guard was to be kept by any six or four men of a vill, and armour was to be maintained for keeping the peace according to wealth and not legal estate. In general it may be said that changing conditions made the peasant more important in warfare and weakened the distinction between the free and unfree. Similarly, the villein was assessed for the new tax on movables in 1225, 1232, and 1237.¹ His possessions, as well as his arms, were becoming important to the community; and it was natural that he acquired some of the rights to property appertaining to the freeman.

The increasing importance of the villein may even, despite Bracton, have been reflected in the Common Law. He was allowed to make and enforce a contract. If he purchased freehold land he could protect it against a third person by use of the assize of Novel Disseisin. The law excluded the villein from the royal courts, but it did not tolerate an arbitrary extension of villeinage. When a dispute was brought before the judges concerning the status of an individual, the judges usually placed the onus of proof not upon the alleged villein but upon the lord. Adam, son of Reginald Stenwith, was able successfully to defend his freedom at Lincoln in 1219 by appeal to a jury, which declared that his father had been free although his own status was in doubt. By Bracton's day it was argued that the child of a mixed marriage was free unless he had been born in the villein tenement of the villein partner; but in practice, the courts seem to have favoured the rule that the child followed the condition of the father.

On the whole, however, the balance of profit and loss seems somewhat surprisingly to have been against the peasant, both freeman and villein, at least on a short term view. Demographic growth was to be an abiding source of strength; but by the end of the thirteenth century it seemed to present itself as a weakness to the poorest of the poor, who were least able to grapple with the problems it created. It gave rise to a great land hunger which enabled a number of lords to maintain and even to revive the traditional labour dues, especially those owed by the villeins, wherever they considered this to be profitable. In the process they not infrequently attempted to depress free tenants into villeinage. Hence increasing general prosperity did not necessarily result in any general benefit to those who held the smallest holdings ot were otherwise not well defended. Labour services remained important. They were retained most, not in the backward areas of the north and west where manorialization was only just spreading, but in the south and east where it had long been established with the exception of Kent. The Essex men were still demanding the abolition of villeinage and labour dues in 1381, though by this time such dues were everywhere visibly in decline.

Demographic increase also brought about a density of cultivation which in some areas was greater than it was to be again before the eighteenth century. Marginal lands were ploughed. Agricultural techniques were improving, especially in the exploitation of demesnes; but they did not keep pace with the growing need for productivity, even though there is evidence of change from the two-field to the three-field system. Hence, whilst in general the thirteenth century was unquestionably a time of remarkable economic advance, and this strengthened liberalizing forces in the agrarian society, this society was neither as prosperous nor as stable as might be expected at first sight. Changes were in fact beginning to occur which, aided by famine and plague, would lead to far-reaching dislocations in the fourteenth century.

2. TRADE AND TOWNS

A more unmistakable progress, but with some problems not dissimilar, occurred in the cities and towns. Here, also, there was a hierarchical order of society. Trade and town privileges were the creation of the wealthy, organized into gild merchants. Corresponding to the lower strata of the vill were the unenfranchised of the cities, who bore no special burdens but who also had no voice in civic affairs and few chances of profit. But the city, nevertheless, was more democratic than the countryside and enclosed the most vital and progressive part of society. Citizens were fiercely self-conscious, hostile to the outer world, and loyal to their own community. Their way of life was far richer, more varied and more stimulating, than anything in the agrarian areas outside great feudal households or important religious centres. Humble though the towns were at the beginning of the thirteenth century, they stood for a new way of living and for new potentialities of advance. Their wealth and number both increased. They had begun as humble encla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• A History of England
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introductory Note
• Table of Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 English Society at the Beginning of the Later Middle Ages
• Chapter 2 Henry III
• Chapter 3 Edward I
• Chapter 4 Edward II and Edward III
• Chapter 5 Richard II
• Chapter 6 England in the Age of Wyclif
• Chapter 7 Henry IV and Henry V
• Chapter 8 Henry VI
• Chapter 9 The Rule of the Yorkist Kings, Edward IV and Richard III
• Chapter 10 Society at the End of the Middle Ages
• Chapter 11 The Framework of Society
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index