by Joseph Gies
For fallowing, the chief means of restoring the fields’ fertility, the villagers used crop rotation in either the ancient two-field or the newer three-field system. In the latter, one field was plowed in the fall and sown with wheat and rye. Each villager planted his own strip of land, all with the same seed. In the spring a second field was plowed and sown to oats, peas, beans, barley, and vetches. A third field was left fallow from harvest to harvest. The next year the field that had been planted with wheat and rye was planted with the oats, barley, and legumes; the fallow field was planted with wheat and rye; and the field that had grown the spring seed was left fallow.
In the older but still widely used two-field system, one field was left fallow and the other tilled half with winter wheat and rye, half with spring seed. The next year the tilled field lay fallow and the fallow field was tilled, with winter and spring crops alternating in the sections that were planted.
The plowman was the common man of the Middle Ages, Piers Plowman, guiding his heavy iron-shod plow, sometimes mounted on wheels to make it go more evenly, cutting the ground with its coulter, breaking it with its share, and turning it over with its wooden mould-board. The medieval husbandman plowed in long narrow strips of “ridge and furrow,” starting just to one side of the center line of his piece of land, plowing the length of the strip, turning at the end and plowing back along the other side, and continuing around. In the wet soil of northern Europe, this ridge-and-furrow plowing helped free the soil from standing water that threatened to drown the grain. Peas and beans were planted in the furrow, grain on the ridge. The ancient pattern of ridge and furrow can still be seen in England in fields long abandoned to grazing.
The husbandman’s plow was drawn by a team of oxen whose number has provided a tantalizing mystery for scholars. Manorial records in profusion refer to teams of eight oxen, but pictorial representations nearly always show a more credible two, or occasionally four. Two men operated the plow, the plowman proper grasping the plow handles, or stilts, while his partner drove the oxen, walking to their left and shouting commands as he used a whip or goad. Behind followed men and women who broke up the clods with plow-bats or, in planting time, did the sowing.
On occasion villages increased their area under cultivation either by sowing part of the field that would normally have lain fallow or by making assarts, bringing wasteland under the plow. Such important measures were executed only with the agreement of all the villagers, and the land thus gained was shared equally.
Equality, in fact, was the guiding principle in the village, within the limits of two basic social classes: the more prosperous peasants, whose land was sufficient to support their families, and the cottars, who had to hire out as day-laborers to their better-off neighbors. The better-off villagers commonly held a “yardland” or a “half-yardland” (thirty or fifteen acres, or, in the terminology of northern England, two oxgangs or one oxgang). Along with these holdings went a portion of the village meadow, about two acres, the location decided by an annual lottery. At the lower end of the scale, the cottars held five acres of land or less; they had to borrow oxen from their neighbors for plowing, or were even forced to “delve,” that is, cultivate with a spade. At least half an average village’s holdings were in the cottar class, too small to feed a family and requiring the supplement of income gained by hiring out. In some demesnes the lord’s land was cultivated chiefly or even entirely by such hired labor.
A second distinction among the villagers was based on personal rather than economic status: They were either free or non-free. Most of the villagers, whether half-yardlanders or cottars, were non-free, or villeins (the term “serf” was less common in England), which meant mainly that they owed heavy labor service to their lords: “week’s work,” consisting of two or three days a week throughout the year. A villein had other disabilities—he was not protected by the royal courts, but was subject to the will of his lord in the manorial courts; he could not leave his land or sell his livestock without permission; when his daughter married, he had to pay a fee; when he succeeded to his father’s holding, he paid a “relief,” or fine, and also a heriot, usually the best beast of the deceased. Most important, however, in an age of limited technology, when every hour’s work was precious, was the compulsion to work on the lord’s lands, plowing, mowing hay, reaping, shocking and transporting grain, threshing and winnowing, washing and shearing the lord’s sheep. By the thirteenth century labor services were often commuted into money payments. But in cash or kind, approximately half of all the villein’s efforts ultimately went, in one way or another, to the lord’s profit.
The rents and services of a villein were described in the manor custom books, often in elaborate detail: how much land the tenant was to plow with how many oxen, whether he was to use his own horse and harrow, or fetch the seed himself from the lord’s granary. Usually there were special rents for special rights—a hen at Christmas (the “woodhen”) in return for dead timber from the lord’s wood, or the right to pasture cattle on some of the lord’s land in return for a plowing. At certain times of crisis during the year the lord could call on all of his tenants—free and unfree—to leave their own farming and work for him, plowing, mowing, or reaping. These movable works, called boons or benes, were the longest preserved of all work services. In return, the lord gave food, drink, or money, or sometimes all three. Benes were classified accordingly—the alebidreap and the waterbidreap, when the lord gave ale or water; the hungerbidreap, when the villagers were obliged to bring their own food; the dryreap, when there was no ale. The food donated by the lord was generally plentiful—meat or fish, pea or bean soup, bread and cheese. In theory these benes were done for the lord out of love—they were “love-boons”—as for any neighbor that needed help, like the community effort of a barn-raising or a town bee. Like these, they were the occasion of social gatherings. A characteristic feature was the “sporting chance”; at the end of the working day the lord gave each hay-maker a bundle of hay as large as he could lift with his scythe, or a sheep was loosed in the field, and if the mowers could catch it they could roast it.
In every village were found at least a few free tenants. Some simply held their land free of most labor services, owing money rents and “suit,” meaning attendance at certain courts. Others were the skilled craftsmen: the miller, the smith, the carpenter, the weaver, the tanner, the shoemaker. Most prosperous among these, and least popular, was the miller, who paid the lord for the right to operate the mill, a strictly enforced monopoly. The villagers brought their grain there, contributing in payment the multure, a sixteenth to a twenty-fourth part of the grain. Since the millers did the measuring, they naturally fell under suspicion of cheating on weight. They were also accused of substituting bad grain for good. A medieval riddle asked, “What is the boldest thing in the world?” and replied, “A miller’s shirt, for it clasps a thief by the throat daily.” A few villagers secretly ground their grain with a hand-mill at home, but ran the risk of seizure and punishment.
The smith had the privileges of using charcoal from the lord’s wood and having his land plowed by the lord’s plows, in return for which he shod the lord’s horses and ground his scythes and sheep shears, along with those of the villagers. The carpenter, with similar privileges, repaired the plows, carts, and harrows, and built and mended houses and furniture.
The poorest people in the village, the cottars, were sometimes free too, although they might hold nothing more than their cottages and the yards that surrounded them. When they were unfree, they owed lesser services than the more substantial villeins—“hand work” rather than plowing: spreading dung, repairing walls and thatches, digging ditches.
Given the choice between freedom and more land, any villager would have chosen land. Land, in fact, was the real freedom.
Over the majority of villagers, the landholding villeins, the lord in theory had arbitrary power. He could increase a villein’s rents and services at will, or seize his holdings. In practice, howev
er, the lord’s legal position was modified by an accumulation of traditions that had the force of law. Custom was reinforced by the fact that the lord could not survive without the services of his tenants. The lord rarely pressed them so hard that they ran away, or even resisted him. Unless a tenant failed to perform his services, he remained in possession of his holding and could pass it on to his heir. Even the wood and wasteland, theoretically owned by the lord, could only be exploited within limits imposed by custom.
Lord and tenant rarely met face to face, the manor’s affairs being left to the steward or bailiff. Nevertheless, the tenant-lord relationship was as reciprocal as it was real. Furthermore, it was permanent. Villeins were bound to the land, but at the same time custom ruled that they could not be deprived of their holdings. A villein could leave the manor if he paid a fine and a yearly fee while he stayed away, but leaving meant losing his land.
The village community met at intervals in an assembly called a bylaw, a term that applied to the body as well as to the rules it passed. At these bylaws, all matters were decided that were not automatically regulated by custom—the choice of herdsmen, problems of pasture and harvest, the repair of fences, and the clearing of ditches. It was decided who should be hired to glean and reap, when and how the harvesting should take place, in what order animals should be allowed to graze after the harvest. Every villager had a voice. Decisions were made not by vote but by consensus: Everyone expressed his view, but once a general agreement emerged from the discussion, it became unanimous. No lengthy disagreement was tolerated, and the stubborn or rebellious were threatened with fines.
The bylaws of an Oxfordshire manor in 1293 declared: “No one shall in time of autumn receive anyone as a gleaner who is able to do the work of a reaper.” In other words, able-bodied men, strong enough to swing a scythe in reaping, were not to do gleaning—gathering the grain after the reapers were finished—a job reserved for elders and women. Second, “No one shall give anyone sheaves in the field.” Reapers who received their wages in sheaves were not to carry them off from the fields; to prevent stealing, the sheaves had to be taken to the villagers’ own homes and given out by the man from whose lands they came. Third, “No one shall enter the fields with a cart to carry grain after sunset;…none shall enter the fields except at the village entrances;…all grain…gathered in the fields shall be borne out openly through the midst of the town and not secretly by back ways.” In this way the villagers could watch everyone who came and went during the harvest.
A bylaw of 1329 read: “No one shall take in outsiders or natives who behave themselves badly in the gleaning or elsewhere…Also, no one may tether horses in the fields amid growing grain or grain that has been reaped where damage can arise. Also, no one may make paths, by walking or driving or carrying grain, over the grain of another to the damage of the neighbors or at any other time.” With holdings scattered and intermixed, roadways and paths required strict regulation.
Another early fourteenth-century bylaw read: “Item, that sheep shall not precede the larger animals”—that is, plow oxen were to be pastured on the stubble of harvested fields before the close-cropping sheep.
In the bylaws, the villagers met not as tenants of a lord but as a democratic community. The regulations they agreed on involved not their relationship to the lord but to each other. The lord was affected by the bylaws only as another landholder in the village, with a common interest in the harvest and pasture. In the written records of the bylaws found in the rolls of manorial courts, the lord was seldom mentioned; instead the regulations were enacted by the “community” or the “homage” or the “tenants” or the “neighbors.”
A characteristic institution of the manor was its court, known in England as the hallmote or halimote, a place where the lord dealt justice to his tenants, pocketing the fines. The lowest court in the feudal hierarchy, it was also the chief private court. Except in cases of murder or felony (tried by royal courts), the manorial court had general jurisdiction over all matters concerning the villagers. It took its name from the lord’s hall; it was a moot (Anglo-Saxon, “court”) that met in the hall, although actually it sometimes met in the open air, under a traditional tree, or in the parish church.
Presiding over the court was the lord’s steward, but he did not act as judge. His presence gave weight to the court’s decisions, but the verdicts, decided by the custom of the manor, were rendered either by a jury of the court or by the whole body of its suitors. These were the men who owed attendance, or “suit,” to the court, that is, the villeins of the manor and freeholders whose ancestors had owed suit, or who held land by a charter stipulating that they owed suit. Failure to attend meant a fine, unless the suitor sent someone with an excuse; the manorial court roll usually began with a list of the jurors, followed by a list of the excuses (essoins). The jurors, usually twelve in number, were chosen from the suitors. If a freeman was to be tried, a special jury of freemen seems to have been formed. In some villages the same men, a kind of aristocracy of jurymen, were chosen again and again.
The hallmote was more than a court of law; it handled many of the functions of the manorial government: the election and swearing in of manorial officials; payments for permission to marry, to enter the Church, to inherit a holding. When an heir succeeded to his father’s land, a ceremony was enacted in the manorial court similar to that in which a king or baron invested the heir of a vassal with his lands. He received seisin (possession) of his holding “by the verge,” which, as in the case of king or baron, dramatized the legal fiction that was the basis of relationship between lord and tenant: that the lord repossessed the holding and then regranted it to the heir, although inheritance was in fact fixed by custom. The steward held out a “verge” (stick) to the heir. When the heir took hold of the end of it, he was understood to have possession, as if the right flowed from steward to tenant along the stick.
Besides these official matters, the courts handled infractions of manorial customs concerning harvest, pasture, the maintaining of fences, and disputes among villagers over slanders, trespasses, boundaries, debts, and contracts. The usual punishment for a misdemeanor was a fine, sometimes in money, sometimes in workdays, which went to the lord.
Lawyers were not allowed in the manorial courts. Cases were presented by the manorial officers concerned, or by the plaintiffs. In criminal cases, the steward might order the accused to find a certain number of men who would swear with him as a body that he was innocent of the misdeed with which he was charged. In a community where everyone knew his neighbor’s business, if a man could find the necessary oath takers, he went free.
In civil cases, the procedure was by complaint. The plaintiff appeared before the court and complained that the defendant had injured him in such-and-such a way. The defendant could delay the case through a certain number of summonses, distraints, and excuses. Sometimes the plaintiff dropped the case. If he did so, however, he had to pay a fine, so that the lord did not have his court’s time wasted. If the case did come to trial, the plaintiff opened with a statement of his plea, following traditional formulas, and the defendant replied, answering each item of the plea word for word, great stress being placed on the accuracy of wording. After both parties had been heard, judgment might be given by the jury, or by the whole court. The case was decided according to the facts and the custom: which of the two parties was believed to be telling the truth, and what was the custom of the manor. Sometimes the court decided that the suit was merely an expression of bad feeling, and the steward ordered the parties to hold a “love-day” before another hallmote at which they settled their differences and were reconciled.
Twice a year in some of the English counties, courts of the View of Frankpledge were held. In these districts all men twelve years and over were divided into groups of ten or twelve persons called frankpledges or tithings. The head of each tithing, the chief pledge, or tithingman, was usually elected for a year but often served for many years. Frankpledge was a police measure,
a system by which a group of men was made responsible for the misdeeds of any of its members. Any malefactors in the group had to be brought to court, and the tithing could be fined for failure to do so. The twice-yearly inspection of the system known as the View of Frankpledge was originally held by the sheriff as a royal officer, but later, in many cases, it was usurped by the lords of manors as a source of income. It was also the occasion for the meeting of the most important manorial courts of the year, the Great Courts, which freeholders exempted from the ordinary hallmotes were compelled to attend, and where matters of local police and lesser cases of the Crown were presented.
The everyday relations of the villagers with the castle were governed by ancient custom and regulated by a group of officials at whose head was the lord’s bailiff. The bailiff’s duties on the lord’s demesne land, as summed up in Seneschaucie, were manifold. He must survey the manor every morning—its woods, crops, meadows, and pastures; see that the plows were yoked; order the land marled and manured. He must watch over the threshers, the plowmen, the harrowers, and sowers; over the reaping and shocking, the sheep shearing, and the sale of wool and skins. He must inspect the lord’s oxen, cows, heifers, and sheep, and weed out the old and weak, selling those that could not be maintained over the winter.
To the villagers the bailiff was the collector and enforcer—collector of rents and enforcer of labor services. Understandably, he was little loved. A fourteenth-century sermon told of a bailiff who, while riding to a village to collect rents, met the Devil in human form. The Devil asked, “Where are you going?” The bailiff replied, “To the next village, on my master’s business.” The Devil asked if he would take whatever was freely offered to him. The bailiff said Yes, and asked the questioner who he was and what was his business. The Devil replied that he was the Devil, busy like the bailiff in quest of gain, but willing “not to take whatever men would give me; but whatsoever they would gladly bestow with their whole heart and soul, that will I accept.” “You do most justly,” said the bailiff. As they approached the village, they saw a plowman angrily commending to the Devil his oxen that repeatedly strayed from the course. The bailiff said, “Behold, they are yours!” “No,” said the Devil, “they are in no wise given from the heart.” As they entered the village they heard a child weeping, and its mother wishing it to the Devil. Said the bailiff, “This is yours indeed!” “Not at all,” said the Devil, “for she has no desire to lose her son.” At length they reached the end of the village. A poverty-stricken widow whose only cow the bailiff had seized the day before saw him coming, and on her knees with hands outstretched shrieked at him, “To all the devils of hell I commend thee!” Whereupon the Devil exclaimed, “To be sure, this is mine. Because thus cordially you have been bestowed on me, I am willing to have you.” And snatching up the bailiff, he bore him away to hell.