Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape

A study of three communities

Susan Kilby

• Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781912260201
• eBook ISBN: 9781912260317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. For too long, the principal intellectual approach has been to consider both subject and evidence from a modern, rationalist perspective and to afford greater importance to the social elite. New perspectives are needed. By re-evaluating the source material from the perspective of the peasant worldview, it is possible to build a far more detailed representation of rural peasant experience. Susan Kilby seeks to reconstruct the physical and socio-cultural environment of three contrasting English villages - Lakenheath in Suffolk, Castor in Northamptonshire and Elton in Huntingdonshire - between c. 1086 and c. 1348 and to use this as the basis for determining how peasants perceived their natural surroundings. In so doing she draws upon a vast array of sources including documents, material culture, place-names and family names, and the landscape itself. At the same time, she explores the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology and historical geography. This highly interdisciplinary process reveals exciting insights into peasant mentalities. For example, cultural geographers' understanding of the ways in which different groups 'read' their local landscape has profound implications for the ways in which we might interpret evidence left to us by medieval English peasant communities, while anthropological approaches to place-naming demonstrate the distinct possibility that there were similarities between the naming practices of First Nations people and medieval society. Both groups used key landscape referents and also used names as the means by which locally important history, folklore and legends were embedded within the landscape itself. Among many valuable insights, this st

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1311, the clerk of the Lakenheath manorial court enrolled a charter detailing a lease between the prior of Ely and Richard, son of Richard in the Lane for all the demesne fisheries of Lakenheath for a ten-year period in return for annual rent of £13 10s. In the agreement, the prior retained his right to half the bitterns and all the pike of a certain size, as was his prerogative as lord of the manor. For his part, Lane acquired access to the appurtenant weirs and fens, alongside the rights to eighteen courses for fishing boats on the water of wendilse, and the custody of the lord’s swans. During this period, Lakenheath fisheries were interchangeably described as fens, and almost fifty are detailed in the manorial records. The demesne fisheries would have comprised a small proportion of this number, but, nevertheless, the grant clearly gave Lane rights over a significant acreage of demesne resources.¹ Three years later, an inquisition post mortem valued Lakenheath’s Clare fee fisheries at £1.² It is possible to draw from this that in 1311 Richard in the Lane had access to a greater and more valuable expanse of one of Lakenheath’s key seigneurial assets than did Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and one of England’s leading magnates. However, in stark contrast to de Clare, Richard in the Lane was a servile peasant, legally bound to the prior’s manor of Lakenheath.

Within this one brief example it is possible to find – in concentrated form – all of the elements that form the principal lines of enquiry followed within this volume. Leasing demesne resources to peasants was not, of course, unprecedented, and in some respects this agreement is unremarkable. Given, however, that certain seigneurial assets, including fisheries, parks, gardens, dovecotes and warrens, were strongly associated with lordship – in actuality and within contemporary literature and illuminations – it reveals a dichotomy between the way lords perceived their rural resources and the practical realities of managing the rural environment, as outlined in chapter two.³ Despite images showing peasants occupying their rightful place in lords’ fields, as they do in the Luttrell Psalter, while absent from strictly seigneurial spaces, Richard in the Lane junior’s lease of the Lakenheath fisheries dispenses with the myth perpetuated by elites that the local environment was characterised by clear divisions between lordly and peasant space. At the same time, Lane cannot be considered an archetypal peasant in this respect: not all Lakenheath peasants had authorised access to demesne resources. Nevertheless, as chapter three shows, authorisation was not always sought by peasants traversing their local landscape. Considering the size and value of the fisheries he leased, Lane’s status is noteworthy, complementing the analysis of rural social hierarchies that forms the focus of chapter four. The fishery named in the lease – wendilse – reminds us that the rural landscape of medieval England was a patchwork of named places, and that these names had been devised by those who knew it best – the resident peasants. The great importance of the named environment to peasant culture is considered in chapter five. As a servile individual, Lane would have been aware that the details relating to his lease would have been documented by the clerk of the manorial court, creating a permanent record of the transaction. Although they were increasingly drawn to written court records in the later medieval period as an aide-mémoire, the written word was generally untypical of the means through which peasants remembered important events, as outlined in chapter six. The Lakenheath fisheries were clearly an important aspect of Lane’s economic wellbeing, and the peasant economy forms the focus for chapter seven. Finally, the lease provides an insight into the ways in which both landscape and resources were managed in the rural environment, and this forms the key consideration for chapter eight.

The study of the medieval rural environment and its inhabitants is at an exciting crossroads. In recent years, landscape archaeologists and historical geographers have begun to turn their attention away from a focus on the physical environment in which debates concerning form and function have dominated the scholarly discourse. Similarly, social and economic historians, formerly preoccupied with comparisons between medieval and modern productivity, have started thinking about rural England and its inhabitants from new perspectives. Today, a growing number of scholars from all these disciplines are concentrating on uncovering the experiences of those living in rural settlements, as Sally Smith outlines: ‘focus[ing] on the people who occupied the landscape … explor[ing] the complex webs of social relationships in which they operated, and … try[ing] to … enquire into the practices of living in the medieval settlement and the meanings thus invoked and revoked’.⁴ Increasingly, scholars following this line of enquiry take an interdisciplinary approach to the challenge of revealing the lived experiences of late medieval rural dwellers. As Matthew Johnson has suggested, in order to approach the rural landscape in this way it is necessary to introduce a range of contextual information allowing us to respond to the complexities of elucidating the human experience of past societies.⁵ This requires us not only to draw upon a vast array of sources, including documents, material culture, place-names and the landscape itself, but to explore the approaches adopted by a wide variety of academic disciplines, including onomastics, anthropology, ethnography, landscape archaeology, history and historical geography. It was in this spirit that the Medieval Settlement Research Group recently convened a series of workshops resulting in the report ‘Perceptions of Medieval Landscape and Settlement’.⁶ Other academic networks subsequently established have followed broadly the same intellectual path; particularly noteworthy in this context was the 2009 collaboration between the universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Durham in assembling a group of interdisciplinary scholars to investigate the sense of place in Anglo-Saxon England.⁷

This open approach adopted by many scholars of the rural environment has been marked by a growing body of interdisciplinary work in which the emphasis has shifted away from a narrow focus on the physical environment to a more anthropic view that places human experience at the centre of the equation – in a sense, ‘repopulating’ the rural landscape. Archaeologists are now concerned to move beyond the materiality of rural settlements to consider the experiences of those residing there. This ranges from how the built environment and its environs were perceived by those encountering it to a more anthropological focus on the human experience of dwelling and working in rural settlements.⁸ In many instances, this new focus extends beyond the residential core and out into the surrounding fields and the wider landscape.⁹ Landscape archaeologists are not alone in this endeavour, and researchers from a range of disciplines have contributed to scholarship on this subject, with many taking an interdisciplinary approach. To date, various themes have been investigated, including the medieval economy,¹⁰ ways of living in the rural environment,¹¹ ways of organising the landscape of the rural settlement,¹² ways of moving through the landscape,¹³ and considerations of ritual and religion.¹⁴

This interdisciplinary study is situated within this emerging scholarly context and assesses a wide range of source material to consider peasant perspectives on the medieval landscape between c.1086 and c.1348. Through a detailed evaluation of three rural settlements – Elton in Huntingdonshire, Castor in Northamptonshire and Lakenheath in Suffolk – this study examines the myriad ways in which the lower orders of society regarded the familiar landscapes in which they lived and worked. Beginning with an assessment of seigneurial perspectives on the rural environment, chapter two takes us from the later Anglo-Saxon period into the fourteenth century, evaluating the evolution of elite aspects of settlement and landscape and the establishment and development of a lordly presence there. This not only helps to demonstrate the ways in which lords viewed rural settlement but also provides insights into how they thought about the resident community. Chapter three follows on from this to consider the organisation of the settlement, beginning with an assessment of the placement of each respective manorial curia and its proximity to peasant dwellings. Issues of privacy and ownership are considered, leading us to reflect on the regulation of movement through the settlement and its wider landscape through an analysis of how locals chose to navigate their way through their environment. Chapter four continues to explore socially constructed ideas of place through an examination of topographical bynames and family names – such as atte grene – that closely linked particular families with their local environment. In particular, it focuses on why these names were most commonly associated with servile individuals and seeks to explain this phenomenon through a more detailed analysis of Huntingdonshire.

Chapter five then turns more fully to the landscape surrounding the settlement, examining the naming practices adopted by medieval communities using microtoponyms – field-names and other minor landscape names. As these names are generally considered to have been coined by peasants, their importance as a key source cannot be underestimated. It is possible to detect differences in the naming strategies selected by different communities, and the conceivable reasons for this are explored in detail. While this chapter focuses largely on the apparent transparency of landscape names, chapter six offers a detailed case study of a small part of Castor’s landscape, drawing on field-names, documents and material culture to emphasise the prominent role that the landscape played as a repository for local legend and folklore. Here, field-names with seemingly straightforward meanings are revealed as having had a potentially more important function in preserving local collective memory. Thus, this chapter offers a cautionary note that field-names are not always unambiguous, and that contextual analysis can reveal meaning that has long since been obscured.

Chapter seven turns toward what might be seen as a more traditional focus – especially for social and economic historians – on the agrarian economy. Its position in the volume does not reflect its lack of importance, but simply emphasises th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• General Editor’s preface
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Understanding the seigneurial landscape
• 3. Ordering the landscape
• 4. The unseen landscape
• 5. Naming the landscape
• 6. The remembered landscape
• 7. The economic landscape
• 8. Managing the landscape
• 9. Conclusion
• Bibliography