Lost Letters of Medieval Life

English Society, 12-125

Martha Carlin, David Crouch, Martha Carlin, David Crouch

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812223361
• eBook ISBN: 9780812207569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Everyday life in early thirteenth-century England is revealed in vivid detail in this riveting collection of correspondence of people from all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls. The documents presented here include letters between masters and servants, husbands and wives, neighbors and enemies, and cover a wide range of topics: politics and war, going to fairs and going to law, attending tournaments and stocking a game park, borrowing cash and doing favors for friends, investigating adultery and building a windmill.While letters by celebrated people have long been known, the correspondence of ordinary people has not survived and has generally been assumed never to have existed in the first place. Martha Carlin and David Crouch, however, have discovered numerous examples of such correspondence hiding in plain sight. The letters can be found in manuscripts called formularies—the collections of form letters and other model documents that for centuries were used to teach the arts of letter-writing and keeping accounts.The writing-masters and their students who produced these books compiled examples of all the kinds of correspondence that people of means, members of the clergy, and those who handled their affairs might expect to encounter in their business and personal lives. Tucked among the sample letters from popes to bishops and from kings to sheriffs are examples of a much more casual, ephemeral kind of correspondence. These are the low-level letters that evidently were widely exchanged, but were often discarded because they were not considered to be of lasting importance. Two manuscripts, one in the British Library and the other in the Bodleian Library, are especially rich in such documents, and it is from these collections that Carlin and Crouch have drawn the documents in this volume. They are presented here in their first printed edition, both in the original Latin and in English translation, each document splendidly contextualized in an accompanying essay.

CHAPTER 1

Money

CREDIT, DEBT, AND COMMERCE

1

Legal Agreement for Pledging a Rural Estate¹

Hec est convencio pignorancie

Hec est convencio facta inter A. et B., scilicet, quod predictus A. invadiavit dicto B. x acras terre, cum capitali mesuagio et cum omnibus pertinenciis, infra villam cum firma rusticorum, pro x. marcis. Set predictus A. excepit² et reservavit³ ad opus suum forisfacturam [rusticorum],⁴ et presencias ad natalem, et precaturas temporum augusti, stagnum et molendinum, quibus predictis [exceptis],⁵ prenominatus⁶ [B.]⁷ habebit omnia que pertinent ad predictam in omnibus locis et aisiamentis ad comodum suum faciendum donec predictus A. reddiderit predicto B. x. marcas argenti vel equivalenciam.⁸ Hanc terram invadiavit predicto B. anno tricesimo⁹ a coronacione¹⁰ Regis Henrici tercii.

This is an agreement for a pledge

This is the agreement made between A. and B., namely, that the said A. has pledged to the said B. ten acres of land, with a capital messuage and all its appurtenances, within the vill [of—], together with the farm of its villeins, for ten marks. But the aforesaid A. has excluded and reserved to his own use the forfeits of [the villeins] and the presents at Christmas,¹¹ and the August boon-works, the pond and the mill. Apart from those said exceptions, the aforesaid [B.] shall have all things that appertain to the said land in all places and easements, to put to his own profit, until the said A. shall pay to the said B. ten marks of silver or the equivalent. He has pledged this land to the said B. in the thirtieth year since the coronation of King Henry III [October 28, 1245 × October 27, 1246].¹²

This document provides a small snapshot of life on an English manor in the first half of the thirteenth century. The lord of the manor in an unnamed vill¹³ is evidently in need of cash. To get it, he has pledged a “capital messuage” (a building plot containing a high-status dwelling) and its appurtenances, together with additional specified economic assets. That is, the lord has pledged the manor house (which he may or may not have used as a personal residence) and all other buildings and other things attached to it, together with ten acres (4.05 ha.) of land, the “farm” of his villeins (i.e., the cash rent and other obligations, such as weekly labor-services, due from his unfree tenants),¹⁴ and any easements (rights of access) that belonged to the property. He has, however, excluded from the pledge and reserved to his own use some valuable perquisites (entitlements) that are part of this estate.¹⁵ These are the forfeits (fines or fees) paid by the servile tenants (serfs or villeins) to the lord’s manorial court;¹⁶ the “presents” at Christmas, which in fact were not voluntary gifts, but annual rents in kind, such as eggs, hens, and loaves of bread, that tenants were required to render to their lord;¹⁷ the seasonal (“boon”) works, such as reaping or carting, which were due from the villeins and sometimes also from free tenants at harvest-time in August; and the use and profits of the pond (probably the millpond, which might double as a fishpond)¹⁸ and the mill, which servile tenants were required to use, for a fee, for grinding their grain.¹⁹

The fact that the lord of this manor has reserved the labor-services that were due from his villeins at harvest-time implies that his demesne (home farm) consisted of more than the ten acres pledged here, and that he needed the villeins’ labor to bring in the harvest or perform other seasonal tasks. This reservation, together with that of the fines paid by the lord’s villeins to his manor court and of the “presents” that they owed to him at Christmas, suggests that the manor was a populous and prosperous one, with enough tenants to make the lord’s court and mill profitable, and to provide valuable labor-services at harvest-time and “gifts” at Christmas.

To redeem this pledge, the lord would have to pay ten marks (£6 13s. 4d.) in silver or the equivalent value in grain or some other commodity. That sum probably included a percentage of concealed interest, meaning that he would have received a loan of less than ten marks in cash.²⁰ Although the term of the loan is not specified, the lord evidently does not expect to be able to redeem his property in less than half a year, or he would not have reserved perquisites that would require a period of at least five months (August-Christmas) to yield their value.

The reference to a pond suggests that the mill mentioned in this document was probably a watermill. The windmill, a recent invention, occurs in other documents in this volume (see Chapter 5). For other accounts of life on the manor, see Documents 20–21, 49–53, 90, 93 and 98–99.

The date attached to this document is of great significance in dating the formulary in Add. 8167 (see Introduction, pp. 6–8). The dating of legal documents was by no means universal in practice or consistent in form at this time. In early thirteenth-century England, the routine keeping of written records was a comparatively recent development, and many documents were not dated at all. When the date was included, it might be given as the year A.D., expressed in Latin as anno domini (“in the year of the Lord”) or as anno gracie (“in the year of grace”). However, there was widespread disagreement about when the year began. The historian Gervase of Canterbury, a Benedictine monk (d. 1210), noted that “the solar year, according to Roman tradition and the custom of the church, begins on 1 January,” but that three other Christian holy days were commonly used as well for beginning the new year. “Some people,” he wrote, “begin the year at the Annunciation [March 25], some at the Passion [Easter], some at the Circumcision [January 1], . . . but most, whom I shall follow, begin the year of grace at Christmas. For it is our custom to count men’s years and age not from conception but from birth.”²¹ In France during the reign of Philip Augustus (1180–1223), the royal chancery adopted Easter as the start of the new year, but in England the practice shifted from beginning the new year at Christmas to beginning it on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation (also known as Lady Day).²²

Such inconsistencies could cause much confusion, and in England, beginning in the reign of Richard I “the Lionheart” (1189–99), when a document was dated, it became common to avoid or to supplement the A.D. date by citing the regnal year of the sovereign. During the reigns of Richard I and of his brother John (1199–1216) and John’s son Henry III (1216–72), regnal years were dated (as here in DOCUMENT 1) from the day of the king’s coronation; later sovereigns’ regnal years were dated from the day of their accession.²³ Other dating systems were also in use, however, either in conjunction with the regnal date or in place of it. For example, some letters issued by prelates were dated from their assumption of office (e.g., “in the fourth year of our pontificate”), while other documents were dated by reference to important events (e.g., the captivity of Arthur, duke of Brittany, discussed below). There were also multiple systems in use for identifying the precise day on which a document was dated. Some documents, then as now, simply named the day and month (e.g., “the third day of June”), while others identified them by reference to a saint’s-day (e.g., “Tuesday before the feast of St Michael the Archangel”) or by the usage of the ancient Roman calendar (e.g., “the calends of August”).

Examples of the variety of dating systems that were in use in early thirteenth-century England can be seen in contemporary formularies. In the formulary in Walters MS W. 15 (c. 1202–9), a brief instruction on dating clauses gives three different examples: “in the year from the incarnation of the Lord, 1199; or thus, in the fourth year from the coronation of King John; or, in the second year from the captivity of Arthur.”²⁴ In Add. 8167, one model agreement (convencio) also gives three different forms for dates: “This was done in the year of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Money
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Money
• Chapter 2. War And Politics
• Chapter 3. Lordship And Administration
• Chapter 4. Family And Community
• Chapter 5. A Knight’S Correspondence: Building a Barn and a Windmill
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Subject Index
• Acknowledgments