Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  Across the street from the curia stood one of a pair of communal ovens to which the villagers were obliged to bring their bread; the other stood in Overend. The ovens were leased from the lord by a baker. A forge was leased by a smith who worked for both the lord and the tenants.51 The green, whose presence is attested by the name of a village family, “atte Grene,” could not have been large enough to serve as a pasture. Its only known use was as a location for the stocks, where village wrongdoers were sometimes held.

  At the opposite end of the village, in Overend, stood the parish church, on the site of earlier structures dating at least to the tenth century. The records make no mention of the rectory, which the enclosure map of 1784 locates in Nether End.

  South of the church in Overend lay the tract of land on which two hundred years later Elton Hall was built. In the thirteenth

  Medieval dovecote, Avebury (Wiltshire).

  Dovecote. Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. 764, f. 80.

  century, this was a sub-manor of Elton, a hide of land held by a wealthy free man, John of Elton, who had tenants of his own.

  A medieval village did not consist merely of its buildings. It

  Man driving geese out of the grain with horn and stick. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 69v.

  included the plowed fields, the meadows, and even the surrounding woods, moor, and marsh. Aerial photographs of deserted medieval villages show open fields with their characteristic pattern of ridge and furrow produced by the plowman. Elton’s fields, under continuous and changing use, show few such traces. A survey of Elton at the beginning of the seventeenth century listed three fields—Ogerston, Middlefield, and Earnestfield—but whether they existed in the thirteenth century remains unknown.52 None of the dozens of place names in the manorial records can be identified with an entire field. Many are names of furlongs, the subdivisions of fields (Holywellfurlong, Knolfurlong, Michelgrove), others of meadows (Gooseholm, Michelholm, Le Inmede, Butterflymead, Abbotsholm), or marsh (Oldmoor, Smallmoor, Newtonmoor, Broadmoor, Oldwychslade). Some are recorded as being leased on a regular basis—to the rector, a furlong called Le Brach, to others Milnespightle (Mill Close), and Clack. The village also had a vineyard, possibly connected with the curia.

  Brian K. Roberts (The Making of the English Village) divides the elements of villages into three overlapping categories: public space, where everyone, including outsiders, has rights; communal space, where all inhabitants have rights, even when the lord holds the land; and private space, where access and use are open only to the proper individuals. The public elements are the church and churchyard, and the highways, streets, and lanes. The communal are the green, the punfold or pound, the oven, the pond, the wells, the stocks, and, most important, the open fields. The private are the manor house and its appurtenances, and the tofts and crofts of the peasants. Some elements are ambiguous: the entries and exits to the fields are both communal and public; the church is not only both public and communal but private, since it belongs to the lord; the smithy, the houses of the demesne servants (cowherd, shepherd), and the rector’s house are both communal and private.53

  Archeologists have classified village plans on the basis of major design elements: “green” villages, clustered around a green or common; street or row villages, built along a street or highway; polyfocal villages, with more than one hub; and composite villages combining several of these types. Elton would seem to be all of these, one of its two sections built around a central green, the other along a highway, each with a separate focus (the manor house, the church). The classification does not really seem very meaningful, and considering the difficulty in tracing the chronology of village plans, not very exact. R. H. Hilton comments that the main physical characteristic shared by medieval villages was their shapelessness. Village streets appear to have come into existence after the tofts and crofts were established, as the paths between the houses became worn down and sunken by the traffic of people, animals, and carts. The village network was in fact more paths than streets.54

  Elton in the late thirteenth century was a large village, capable of summoning 327 residents to a harvest in 1287.55 The royal survey of 1279 lists 113 tenants, heads of families.56 Allowing for wives, children, and landless laborers, a figure of five to six hundred for the total population might be reasonable. This accords with Hilton’s estimate that 45 percent of the villages of the West Midlands had a population of between 400 and 600, with 10 percent larger, the rest smaller.57

  Villages like Elton were not cut off from the world around them. Many Elton surnames indicate family origins elsewhere, and the records sometimes explicitly speak of immigration: Richard Trune, a cotter (cottager), came to Elton from Fotheringhay, in Northamptonshire.58 Many villagers paid an annual fee for license to live outside the manor (or were cited for failing to pay it). Elton village officials traveled to the fairs and markets to make purchases; so did ordinary villagers to sell their produce. Carrying services owed by villeins took them to Ramsey and “any market where the lord wishes inside the county [of Huntingdonshire].”59 Other Ramsey Abbey villagers journeyed as far as London. Free tenants of Elton attended the abbot’s honor (estate) court at Broughton twice a year, as well as the royal courts at Huntingdon and Norman Cross. The world came to Elton, too, in the guise of monks, churchmen, nobles, craftsmen, day laborers, and royal officials.

  Thus the village of Elton, Norman Cross Hundred, Huntingdonshire, England, belonging to Ramsey Abbey, occupying some 1,800 acres of farmland, cultivated its crops and herded its animals in much the same fashion as thousands of other villages in England and on the Continent. By the standards of a later age, it was neither rich nor prepossessing. But in comparison with earlier times, it was a thriving social organism, and an important innovation in social and economic history.

  3

  THE LORD

  EVERY VILLAGE HAD A LORD, BUT ONLY RARELY was he in residence. A resident lord was usually a petty knight who held only one manor, like Henry de Bray, lord of Harlestone (Northamptonshire), whose account book has survived. Henry had twenty-four tenants sharing his five hundred acres, contributing annually twelve pounds in cash rents, a pound of pepper, and eight fowls, and performing harvest services.1 At the other end of the spectrum was the earl, count, abbot, or bishop, whose “honor” was composed of manors scattered over a quarter of England.

  On the Continent such a magnate—a count of Champagne or Flanders—might rival kings in exercising political authority. In Norman England, where William the Conqueror and his successors monopolized political power, the great lords began as generals in an army of occupation, their military role softening over time into an economic one. A “tenant-in-chief” like the earl of Warenne, lord of scores of villages in a dozen counties, collected all kinds of rents and services at first- and second-hand without ever setting eyes on most of his sixty-five knight-tenants, hundreds of freeholders, and thousands of bondmen.2 Between the two extremes of Henry de Bray and the earl of Warenne were middling lords who held several manors and sometimes traveled around among them.

  Besides great and small, lords divided more definably into lay and ecclesiastical. The abbot of Ramsey, whose twenty-three villages included Elton and who held parts of many others, is a good example of the ecclesiastical lord, whose numbers had steadily increased since the Conquest. The old feudal theory of lordship as a link in the legal chain of authority running from serf to monarch had lost much of its substance. The original basis of the feudal hierarchy—military service owed to the crown—had dissipated, owing partly to the objections of knights and barons to service abroad, and partly to the complexity wrought by the accidents of inheritance. It was easier to extract a money payment than to induce an unwilling knight to serve, and money fees, with which soldiers could be hired and equipped, were easier to divide into fractions when a property owed a third or half of a knight’s service.

  To the village, such legal complications hardly mattered, any more than whether the
lord was great or small, lay or ecclesiastical (or male or female, since abbesses, prioresses, widows, and heiresses held many manors). A village might be comfortably shared by two or more lords. Tysoe (Warwickshire) was divided among five different manors, belonging to Baron Stafford, his son, two priories, and the local Knights Templar.3 Often, however, as in the case of Elton, a village constituted a manor, and was one of several belonging to a single lord.

  Whatever the technicalities, the lord was the lord, the consumer of the village surplus. The thirteenth-century manor was not a political or military enterprise but an economic one, with the lord its exploiter and beneficiary.

  It already had a history. In the twelfth century, “farming,” or leasing, the demesne or even the whole manor had been popular. An entrepreneur paid a fixed sum, assumed control of the day-to-day operation, and profited from the difference between the fee he paid and the revenues he collected. The farmer might be a local knight or rich peasant, or a businessman from a nearby town. Sometimes the villagers themselves banded together in a consortium to farm their manor.4 One lord might farm another’s land when geography made it more convenient. The abbot of Ramsey farmed King’s Ripton, a crown manor lying next to Abbot’s Ripton. The farm normally comprised land, animals, implements, personnel, labor services of the villeins, and even the fines levied in the manorial court. The farmer usually held the privilege of making land transfers to maintain production, as when a tenant died without a direct heir.5

  Beginning about 1200, the farming of manors went out of style. The thirteenth century was an age of population expansion, and as town markets for agricultural products grew, more and more lords decided to exploit their manors directly. Some manors continued to be farmed (as was Elton at intervals), but the trend was toward direct and active estate management. To increase demesne production, villeins were often saddled with new labor services, or resaddled with old ones from which they had bought exemption. But the tenants, including the villeins, also began selling in the market. The pendulum swung back, with the lords accepting higher rents and other money payments and using the cash to hire labor to work the demesne. It was an era of prosperity for all, but especially for the lords, who saw their incomes, especially their cash incomes, rise rapidly.

  They had no trouble spending them. By his nature the feudal lord was a dedicated consumer. His social status imposed a life-style of conspicuous consumption, which in the Middle Ages meant mainly consumption of food and drink. The lord was “the man who could always eat as much as he wished,” says Georges Duby, and also “the man who provided others with food,” and was consequently admired for his openhandedness. The very yardstick of his prestige was the number of people he fed: staff, armed retainers, labor force, guests.6

  The abbot of Ramsey’s requirements from his manors included grain, beef, flour, bread, malt for ale, fodder, lard, beans, butter, bacon, honey, lambs, poultry, eggs, herrings, and cheese. Like other lords he also received cash to make the many purchases outside the estate that were needed to keep his household going: horses, cloth, coverlets, hangings, robes, candlesticks, plate.

  Thus as consumer the lord needed revenues both in kind and in cash. As a consumer, he also required services, especially carrying services, to bring the produce from his manors to his castle or monastery. He needed even more services in his other economic capacity, that of producer. Here disparity existed not only among greater and lesser lords, but among their manors. Some were large, some small, some contained much demesne land, some little (a few none). Elton’s thirteen hides were probably close to average, as was also its proportion of about one quarter demesne land. The precise size of the demesne was never regarded as of great moment. Extents for the Ramsey manors of Warboys and Holywell state disarmingly, “The demesne of this manor consists of many furlongs, but it is not known how many acres are contained in them.”7 The acre itself varied erratically even among manors of the same estate.* On Ramsey manors the hide ranged from four virgates to seven, the virgate from fifteen to thirty-two acres, and the size of the acre is uncertain.8

  Demesne land might lie in a compact parcel, separate from the villagers’ fields, or it might, as it evidently did in Elton, lie scattered in strips like those of the tenants with which it was intermingled.

  Where the demesne was large, a large labor force was needed, usually meaning that a substantial proportion of the tenants were villeins owing week-work. Where the demesne was small, most of the tenants were likely to be free, or if unfree, paying a money rent rather than rendering work services.

  To his economic roles as consumer, producer, and landlord, the lord added certain others. He had an important, centuriesold judicial function, his manor courts (hallmotes) dealing in a range of civil and criminal cases that provided him with fines, fees, and confiscations. In addition to dues exacted from his tenants on a variety of occasions—death, inheritance, marriage—the lord enjoyed the “ban,” a monopoly on certain activities, most notoriously on grinding everybody’s grain and baking everybody’s bread. The ban was resented and sometimes evaded, though rigorously enforced by the manor court. So were the lord’s other privileges, such as folding all the village sheep so that their manure could improve his demesne. In Elton in 1306 Richard Hubert and John Wrau were fined because they had “refused to allow [their] sheep to be in the lord’s fold.”9 The same offense brought Geoffrey Shoemaker and Ralph Attwych penalties of sixpence each in 1312, and in 1331 nine villagers were fined for the infraction, in addition to Robert le Ward, who was penalized for harboring the flock of one of his neighbors “to the damage of the lord.”10 On the other hand, an animal that roamed too freely risked the lord’s privilege of “waif and stray”: “One female colt came an estray to the value of 18 pence, and it remains. Therefore let the reeve answer [let the reeve sell the colt and turn over the money].”11 A villager who recovered his impounded animal without license was fined for “making a rescue,” as were Thomas Dyer in 1294 and Isabel daughter of Allota of Langetoft in 1312.12

  One of the lord’s most valuable privileges aroused little resentment: his right to license markets and fairs, granted him by the king or sometimes by another overlord. The abbot of Ramsey’s fair of St. Ives was internationally famous, patronized by merchants from Flanders, France, Italy, and Scandinavia.13 Such fairs and markets enriched both lord and tenants, at least the luckier and more enterprising. (In 1279 the abbot of Ramsey contemplated a weekly market at Elton, and successfully negotiated an agreement for it with the abbot of Peterborough, but for some reason the project was never carried out.)14

  Yet despite all his collections, enforcements, and impingements, perhaps the most arresting aspect of the lord’s relations with the villagers is the extent to which he left them alone. The once popular picture of the lord as “an omnipotent village tyrant” was, in George Homans’s words, “an unrealistic assumption.”15 The medieval village actually lived and worked in a state of near autonomy. The open field system exacted a concert of the community at every point of the agricultural cycle: plowing, planting, growing, and harvesting. It is now virtually certain that the village achieved this concert by itself, with little help or leadership from outside. To Marc Bloch’s observation that there was never any “necessary opposition” between the lord’s manor and the peasants’ village, Homans added that “the manor could be strong only where the village was strong.”16 More recent scholarship has stressed the primacy of the village over the manor in historical development.

  The lord could have little objection to village autonomy. What he wanted was the certainty of rents and dues from his tenants, the efficient operation of his demesne, and good prices for wool and grain. The popularity of treatises on estate management is an indicator of what occupied the minds of the great lords of the late thirteenth century. Walter of Henley’s Husbandry advised its noble readers to “look into your affairs often, and cause them to be reviewed, for those who serve you will thereby avoid the more to do wrong.”17 It was prudent cou
nsel because there was no way for an absentee lord to supervise his scattered manors except through appointed officials.

  These officials, in fact, constituted the lord’s material presence in the village. Three of them, the steward, the bailiff, and the reeve, were the key executives of the manorial system.

  Originally a household servant or majordomo, the estate steward (sometimes called a seneschal) had in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries accomplished a progression paralleling that of Joseph, the Pharaoh’s cupbearer who became chief administrator of Egypt. On estate after estate the steward became the lord’s deputy, chief executive officer for the vast complex of lands, rights, and people. Bishop Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), author of another widely read treatise, Rules of St. Robert, defined the steward’s duty as to guard and increase the lord’s property and stock “in an honest way,” and to defend his rights and franchises.18 A slightly later writer, the anonymous author of Seneschaucie, stipulated legal knowledge as a principal qualification, since the steward now represented the lord in court both on and off the estate. His main function, however, was supervision of all the manors of the estate, which he did primarily by periodic visitation.19 It was hardly possible for a lord to be too careful in his choice, thought the author of Seneschaucie: “The seneschal of lands ought to be prudent and faithful and profitable, and he ought to know the law of the realm, to protect his lord’s business and to instruct and give assurance to the bailiffs.” It was useless to look for wisdom from “young men full of young blood and ready courage, who know little or nothing of business.” Wiser to appoint from among those “ripe in years, who have seen much, and know much, and who…never were caught or convicted for treachery or any wrongdoing”20—something that often befell officials, according to many sermons and satires.