by Ann Swinfen
Faced with an unprecedented situation, and anxious about the effects on both the economy and social mobility, the government of the time passed, in 1351, the Statute of Labourers, fixing agricultural wages at the level which had existed before the Black Death. (It also required all able-bodied men and women under sixty to work, and forbade workers to move away from their homes in search of better conditions.) To pay more than the legal rate set by the Statute would incur punitive fines. In the short term, it may have had some effect. In the long term, it could not halt the tide of changing social conditions.
The disruption and misery which followed the Black Death also, ironically, offered opportunities. Restless villeins sought better conditions on manors other than those to which they were bound by customary service. The boldest of them fled to towns where – if they could find work and remain uncaptured for a year and a day – they would become free citizens.
It was not only the labouring classes whose numbers were decimated by the plague. Ecclesiastics, gentry, and nobility were cut down in comparable numbers. Where a manor was left unoccupied, it fell into the hands of an overlord, often the king, who might grant it as a reward or – in the case of our manor of Leighton – to cancel a debt. Edward III was constantly in need of money to finance his on-going French wars (which have come to be known to historians as the Hundred Years War).
Where a manor was adjacent to a royal forest, the lord could be granted the rights of the chase, the most noble quarry being the stag, although hares were also a popular if lesser quarry. Boar were hunted, but by the latter part of the fourteenth century they were becoming rarer in the more southerly parts of England, where wolves had all but disappeared. The lord of a manor usually also had rights of warren, that is, he could maintain an artificial warren for the snaring of rabbits, not an aristocratic form of sport, but profitable in both skins and meat.
The two forms of hunting deer described here did exist – par force de chiens, the most noble, on horseback, with dogs, and bow and stably, a less dangerous sport, where the hunters were on foot and at little risk. Over the years since the Norman Conquest, the rituals of the hunt, and especially the ceremonious ‘unmaking’ or ‘unlacing’ of the kill, had grown ever more complicated. All young noblemen were expected to know the exact details of these rituals, and the senior huntsman on a manor was every bit as skilled, entrusted with training his assistants (and probably those young nobles as well). He held a senior position in the manor household and was very highly paid, for the chase was the nobleman’s chief sport and entertainment. Moreover, experience in the mounted hunt was felt to train young men in many of the skills they would need in battle.
The lavish hunt breakfast, as described here, was part of the day’s enjoyment, and is illustrated in contemporary manuscripts. Its much diminished descendent is to be found in the modern stirrup cup. I have written about medieval hunting here: http://bit.ly/2lkP3rv where more details of all that it involved can be found.
Women quite often took part in bow and stably hunts, which became more popular toward the latter part of the Middle Ages and into Tudor times. They were also keen on hawking, a less strenuous but nevertheless skilled sport. However, a few bold women rode to the chase par force de chiens, as Lady Edith does. They must surely have ridden astride, for to ride side-saddle in the dangerous conditions of a wild gallop through woodland would have been to invite disaster.
http://www.annswinfen.com
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching in English Literature. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
She is the author of the highly acclaimed series, The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez. Set in the late sixteenth century, it features a young Marrano physician recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. In order, the books are: The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez, The Enterprise of England, The Portuguese Affair, Bartholomew Fair, Suffer the Little Children, Voyage to Muscovy, The Play’s the Thing, and That Time May Cease.
Her Fenland Series takes place in East Anglia during the seventeenth century. In the first book, Flood, both men and women fight desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. The second, Betrayal, continues the story of the dangerous search for legal redress and security for the embattled villagers, at a time when few could be trusted.
Her latest series, Oxford Medieval Mysteries, is set in the fourteenth century and features bookseller Nicholas Elyot, a young widower with two small children, and his university friend Jordain Brinkylsworth, who are faced with crime in the troubled world following the Black Death. In order, the books are: The Bookseller’s Tale, The Novice’s Tale, and The Huntsman’s Tale. Both series are being recorded as unabridged audiobooks.
She has also written two standalone historical novels. The Testament of Mariam, set in the first century, recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history, while exploring life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. This Rough Ocean is based on the real-life experiences of the Swinfen family during the 1640s, at the time of the English Civil War, when John Swynfen was imprisoned for opposing the killing of the king, and his wife Anne had to fight for the survival of her children and dependents.
Ann Swinfen now lives on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a rescue cat called Maxi, and a cocker spaniel called Suki.
www.annswinfen.com