Medieval England

Rural Society and Economic Change 1086-1348

Edward Miller, John Hatcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317872894
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is the first volume of a two-volume study of medieval England covering the period between the Norman Conquest and the Black Death. The book opens with a summary portrait of the English economy and society in the reign of William I. It goes on to examine in detail the population increase from 1086 to 1349 and to investigate the structure of society where relationships were rooted in the dependence of man upon man.

Chapter 1

King William’s England

A study of England’s medieval economic and social history which takes as its point of departure the coming of the Normans to this island begins with something like a false premise. It is true, of course, that the Normans made changes in the distribution and management of land and that the bridge King William built across the Channel furthered the integration of England into the emerging Western economy. On the other hand, one great act of the Conqueror’s has over-emphasized the changes that conquest entailed. The Domesday survey William set in train in 1086 enables scholars to study the Norman tenurial revolution as they cannot study the effects of earlier invasions and conquests. For that reason they are easily persuaded to make too much of the transformation which followed 1066. Further, there had previously been nothing like Domesday Book. It was a descriptio of virtually all England, which can be compared directly with later surveys like those contained in the Hundred Rolls of 1279 and with the great mass of manorial extents. For that reason Domesday is apt to be treated as a point of departure because in practice investigation must begin with it; and the England which lies beyond Domesday is all too easily assumed to be in some way a very different England to that which was surveyed by King William’s commissioners.

In truth, the ‘catastrophic’ view of the Norman Conquest has come under substantial criticism in recent years even in the fields of government, military arrangements and systems of land tenure. Similarly, if details are set aside in favour of essentials, the supposition of basic economic and social changes also withers away. Saxon and Norman England alike bore all the marks of an underdeveloped, pre-industrial economy: technical backwardness, the absence of manufacture as a significant specialized activity, the prominence of subsistence production. The economy was basically agrarian, markets were restricted, levels of real income per head were low, and there were extensive unused resources. Men who were powerful owed their power to the fact that they exploited a disproportionately large share of the cultivable land, or that they appropriated a share of what the great peasant majority produced, or that they did both. Before and after 1066 English society was rooted in the soil and dominated by territorial lords. Moreover, the great movement of economic expansion generated within this society, a movement which culminated in the thirteenth century, began neither in 1086 nor 1066. On the contrary, its commencement as a continuous and cumulative process probably goes back to the tenth century, the point at which England emerged from the worst tribulations of Viking raiding. To start this survey with King William’s England, therefore, is a matter of convenience dictated by the fact that Domesday Book exists. That survey provides the evidential starting point for an investigation of English society and economy in the central Middle Ages just as it summarizes the social and economic outcome of the Anglo-Saxon centuries.¹

The landscape of Norman England

Even Domesday, however, does not provide a portrait of King William’s England that is easily deciphered. A descriptio Domesday may be, but one of rights, charges, customs, duties and titles; it is apt to be much more reticent about the landscape of eleventh-century England. Woodland described as so many leagues in length and breadth can be given a certain impressionistic concreteness on the map in the form of a cross drawn to the appropriate scale; but when we are told that there was wood for such a number of pigs or meadow for such a number of cattle, these measures may have been elastic and may have varied with the fatness or the leanness of the animals. Again, Domesday says little directly about the pattern of communications. In the nature of things overland communications were likely to have been poor and difficult, for the Roman roads were now centuries old and after the Romans left public authorities capable of supervising road maintenance and construction had commonly been lacking. This deficiency was probably mitigated by the facts that no part of England was far from the sea and that rivers were navigable far inland by shallow-draught boats. Consequently, Torksey on the Trent was a Domesday port; Cambridge had its hithe to which boats plied in the reign of Henry I; and in 1086 the king had four ways to York, three by land and the other by water.² None the less communications must have been slow, especially overland communications, making the carriage of bulky commodities both difficult and costly. This was one feature of the landscape which isolated localities, restricted the volume of exchanges and limited the extent of markets.

Defective communications were not alone in isolating communities from each other. Reginald Lennard has rightly pointed to the fact that the England King William conquered was an ‘old country’ which had ‘passed beyond the colonial stage’ and in which the colonizing efforts of Saxon pioneers had laid out ‘the framework of rural England as we know it’. He has also demonstrated how Domesday sometimes conceals the extent of this achievement. Some apparently empty areas are surveyed as appendages to their manorial centres and subsidiary settlements known to have existed within them are simply ignored.³ On the other hand, there remained substantial areas of unused land – both patches of ‘waste’ within settled territories and larger expanses of fen, woodland and high moor still imperfectly exploited by colonizing pioneers.⁴ Marshland areas were still very extensive: around the Kent and Sussex coast, in the Somerset levels, along the Humber estuary and lower Ouse, in the hinterland of the Wash, in the Vale of Pickering and elsewhere. None of them, however, was quite untouched by colonists. Around the Wash, for example, the men of the parts of Holland had already won land from the sea before 1066 and defended it with banks; a belt of occupied territory across the silt fen joined the Norfolk and Lincolnshire uplands; and there were fields and villages on most of the islands of the peat fen interior.⁵

This partial occupation of less rewarding or more difficult terrain is paralleled in other contexts. In the highlands of Dartmoor spearheads of settlement were pushed up to 900 ft on the western edge and to 1,200 ft on the drier eastern side, but in most places the frontiers of cultivation lay lower than that. In the Yorkshire Pennnines there were few settlements above 800 ft and in Lancashire above 500 ft; and in Shropshire the north-western uplands supported only a few small settlements, while much of the Wrekin district, the Clee hills and the south-west were sparsely occupied. Undoubtedly there were flocks and herds grazing these higher lands, but pastoral activities sustained relatively few people and they may well in some places have extended only to summer grazing. Relatively dense settlement in other words, was restricted to the lowland districts and here colonization had frequently progressed very far. Even in northern England much of the valleys and the plains were fully occupied: some five out of six of all the hamlets and villages there ever were in medieval Yorkshire, for example, were already established by 1066. On the other hand, of course, lowland settlements could be few and small where soils was poor or difficult, as on the boulder clays of western Leicestershire, on the limestone heaths of Lindsey and Kesteven, in the sandy Norfolk Breckland, or on the heaviest and least tractable clays.

These clay lands were often wooded and the great tracts of woodland clothing much of England also served as barriers to colonization. Many settlements surveyed by King William’s commissioners are testimony of massive clearances long before 1066, but a great deal of wooded territory still remained. The Adredesweald forest divided the north of Kent and Sussex from the south. The forest of Dean, in the Midlands the forests of Arden, Charnwood and Rockingham, the woodlands stretching almost continuously across Cheshire from the Pennines to the Wirral, and the belt of wooded land extending from southern Northamptonshire through Huntingdonshire to Essex were, like the fens and moorlands, all areas of sparse settlement. So, too, was the treeclad heathland radiating from Southampton Water which King William, that lover of the tall red deer, made into his New Forest. The contrast between wooded and non-wooded land is particularly striking in Warwickshire. In the open ‘felden’, south of the Avon, in 1086 there was an abundant population in large settlements; in woodland Arden to the north settlements were scattered, small and possessed of few ploughs.⁶ From Norman times, moreover, efforts to colonize woodland were hampered by a special forest law designed to preserve whole areas of wood and heath for the king’s hunting; this law not only punished poaching but made the colonist pay heavily for his enterprise. It did not prevent assarting, but it enhanced the cost.

Long centuries of internal colonization had, by 1066, substantially modified the natural landscape of England; but this modification was far from complete. There were substantial areas touched slightly, if at all; the intensity of colonization appears to diminish as the land rises from the plain to the moorland and towards the northern and western peripheries of the kingdom; and men’s hold upon land already settled was sometimes precarious. It might be loosened in the interests of the king’s hunting. In the making of the New Forest, for example, a considerable number of men were evidently displaced and Domesday speaks of Downton (Wilts) men who ibi manentes fugati sunt propter forestam regis (dwelling there, were driven out by reason of the King’s forest).⁷ War, too, temporarily pushed back the frontiers of cultivation. Welsh raids before 1066 and King William’s campaigns left their mark in the west Midlands in ‘waste’ recorded in Domesday Book, though by 1086 recovery was already evident. Yorkshire was far harder hit by the ravaging of the north in 1069 and subsequent population movements, so that the value of land there fell by two-thirds between 1066 and 1086 and more than half the villages of the county were wholly or partially ‘waste’ in 1086.⁸ Recovery soon set in on the more fertile lands, but on the poorer soils ‘waste’ sometimes persisted until, from the twelfth century onwards, monks and laymen combined to push forward the frontiers of cultivation once more. The domestication of the English countryside to the use of men was a process by no means without setbacks.

Settlements

King William’s England, then, had progressed far beyond the colonial stage, but it was still a land somewhat less than completely settled. Much of the wet lands and the high lands remained empty spaces. It may be an exaggeration to describe Durham as a county where, in the Middle Ages, ‘oases of agriculture’ were set in ‘vast deserts of moor and forests’;⁹ but the western parts of the county were undoubtedly sparsely settled. Even where settlement was much denser, moreover, most villages probably possessed their encircling ‘waste’, a no-man’s-land of unimproved pasture which played a vital part in supporting the livestock which, as draught animals or producers of manure, provided an essential complement to the arable fields. These basic characteristics of the eleventh-century landscape are one explanation of the low density of people in King William’s England. What the total population was is a question likely to be eternally debated, but a figure somewhere between 1¼ and 2¼ million is probably of the right order of magnitude with a probability that it ought to lie somewhere in the upper part of that band.¹⁰ So few people meant, not only much empty ground, but also that inhabitants were spread very thinly over the settled area. The average density was about thirty per square mile. People, furthermore, were very unevenly distributed. Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk accommodated almost a quarter of the whole population; Essex, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire were probably more thickly peopled than the average; but the north had only about four or five people per square mile. The rest of England lay between the extremes.

England was not only sparsely settled: in all probability about nine out of every ten of its inhabitants were countrymen. The settlements in which they lived differed in size and coherence and some scholars have made much of the distinction between those parts of the country where men lived in compact ‘nucleated’ villages and those characterized by dispersed settlement in scattered hamlets. It has also been pointed out that, in general, the average size of rural communities decreases as we move from east to west, an observable fact which has been related to an increase of Celtic elements in the population and of Celtic influence on social institutions.¹¹ Too much must not be made of the contrast between east and west (and therefore of racial explanations of it). In many parts of the country larger and smaller settlements are found in close juxtaposition. In the Cambridgeshire hundred of Wetherley the largest village had eighty-two tenants and the smallest only twelve; and across the country in Herefordshire Putley had only two recorded inhabitants while Ashperton had thirty-five. Normally large villages were found in the areas of old settlement on lands easily won and worked. Hamlets, on the other hand, were characteristic of the bleak and narrow valleys of upland Britain, of the forest lands where colonists were at work, and sometimes of fens in the process of being drained.

Domesday seized on this colonizing enterprise at a point in time which did not necessarily represent the final stage in a perennial endeavour. Single homesteads, perhaps representing a first incursion into the ‘waste’, were not unknown – such as the one house at Eardisley in Herefordshire, with two slaves and a rent-paying Welshman attached, which in medio cuiusdam silve est posita (is planted in the midst of a certain wood).¹² Pioneering establishments of this kind shaded off into hamlets like those of Langendale in Derbyshire or of the Welsh border hills; but pockets of small communities were also found in districts where large nucleated villages were the rule. There were hamlets along the fen margins of Lincolnshire, as there were in the colonizing woodland areas of Essex and Hertfordshire and south-east Cambridgeshire. Devon, in particular, illustrates changing patterns of settlement closely related to advances of the frontier of cultivation. Especially on the lower lands there were villages ‘as large and compact as any of the Midland plain’; but these were ringed by hamlets representing colonies thrown off by the older settlements, and yet other hamlets and single homesteads lying deeper in the woods or higher on the moorland were the homes of pioneers at work on the outer margins of cultivation.¹³ Many influences helped to shape patterns of settlement as Domesday Book recorded them: but not least important was the stage which had been reached in bringing land into productive use.

Villages and hamlets were agricultural communities, and above all communities engaged in arable husbandry. The central formula of so many manorial entries in Domesday Book is that there was, in such and such a place, land for so many ploughs, so many ploughs on the demesne and so many in the possession of tenants, and perhaps too that there was meadow enough for the plough teams. Rural settlements have the appearance in most places of being first and foremost groups of ploughmen. They were not, of course, that and that alone. Domesday is often niggardly in the information it gives on matters outside the basic formulae of the survey. Just occasionally, however, we catch a glimpse of men engaged in rural crafts: a few potters in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, saltworkers in Dorset and Devon, ironworkers in Devon and the West Riding, smiths in a number of counties, and a solitary carpenter in Herefordshire (assuredly not the only carpenter in the English counties). There were also men engaged in auxiliary occupations: beekeepers in four western counties and fishermen in various places, but especially numerous in Cambridgeshire. Fairly obviously this sort of information is sometimes given and sometimes omitted, but there is enough of it to indicate some diversification of occupations in village society.

Information regarding men principally engaged in livestock farming was no less sporadically recorded. Domesday tells of a couple of cowmen, 10 shepherds and 555 swineherds (541 of them in Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon). That these figures owed more to the vagaries of the Domesday compilers than to the realities of the situation in 1086 is suggested by the figures available for demesne livestock provided by the Exon and Little Domesday.

Table 1 Demesne livestock in eastern and south-western England, 1066–86¹⁴

These particulars make clear the relative importance of livestock husbandry even in areas where arable cultivation was the basic agricultural activity. Sheep, and to a secondary degree goats, were first and foremost the providers of milk (most of it probably consumed in the form of cheese), although the sheep’s wool and manure were obviously also valued. Sheep numbers, where the evidence serves, were already high and, if tenant flocks could be added to those grazed by lords, may well have been as high in Norfolk and Essex (and likely enough in Somerset) as they were able to be in the 1930s.¹⁵ Cattle, on the other hand, do not appear particularly numerous and breeding stock was in general limited to that required to provide replacements for plough teams. Only in a few places as yet are there signs of dairy cattle taking the place of sheep and goats: in the Cambridge fens at Doddington, for example, and probably also in north-west Devon.¹⁶

Finally, as a source of meat, pigs were probably the most important of all livestock and demesne holdings suggest that they were very numerous. A landscape with much woodland, and much waste land where swine could dig for sustenance, enabled pigs to be kept on a scale sufficient to justify the employment of the many swineherds recorded by Domesday in early Norman Devon.

Despite the arable bias of Domesday,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 King William’s England
• 2 Land and people
• 3 Markets
• 4 Villages
• 5 Villagers: I. Status and tenure
• 6 Villagers: II. Family and fortunes
• 7 Lords
• 8 Landlords and the land
• 9 King Edward’s England
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index of persons and places
• Subject Index