The Normans and Their World
Page 51
Ecclesiastical manors tried hardest to impose feudal systems of work and rent. The priory of Spalding treated its bondmen harshly and had made its sokemen unfree. On lay manors in the thirteenth century the labour services of villeins varied, but were mostly moderate or even light. There was a proliferation of small holdings among both bond-sokemen (molemen) and freemen, with whom we must place at least some of the liberi tenentes of the inquisitions. This came about mainly through the custom of dividing the heritages of sokemen and freemen among the father’s descendants, both male and female. In some villages, a freeman carried on a craft or engaged in trade; but the majority were sokemen and molemen. The customs of partible socage, of inheriting an estate while the father still lived, and of free and frequent sales, were advantageous to the younger generation, who could marry early, beget big families, and feel little need to emigrate. Where these free customs were weaker, we find larger holdings and smaller families (with less branches), and the population growing much more slowly.[485]
The fenmen were skilled drainage engineers from an early date, able to build big sluices to control the rivers as early as Stephen’s reign and probably well before that. We can still walk on their fen banks and sea banks. They had a system of local government that took effective charge of the drainage works, as we see when the system comes into our view in the verdicts of sewers (under Henry VIII onwards). By 1160 the dyke reeve is well attested. Alan of Craon carried out one of the first examples of water-engineering in medieval England; he helped the port of Boston by encouraging a river to change its main course from Bicker Haven to the present Haven. The date, 1142, is perhaps the earliest for the construction of a great sluice in England. Agricultural technique was reflected in the movement of reclamation. In the siltland openfield husbandry gave way to enclosed tofts and crifts; there is also evidence in places of two-course and three-course husbandry. These men were capable of flexibility of outlook in their response to challenges. They liked to grow flax and hemp, with wheat on the drier siltland where monastic estates lay. At all times pastoral farming was important for them. ‘Mutual aid for the good of all (in spite of transgressions),’ says Hallam, ‘was the ideal of a neighbourhood where lordship was at a discount and togetherness the ideal. The results of these sentiments were admirable. The Fenland communities formed the most successful culture in medieval rural England. Together they tamed the fen and marsh for posterity, but they also gave us something for which we must always be their debtors — the finest parish churches in England. These and their great banks are their monuments and the labour of their hands is our reward.’[486]
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Not much change in technique came about for generations, but the amount of stock and number of cultivated acres went on growing. The staple crop was corn, with peas and beans as an extra. A few commercial crops were grown: flax for linen, woad and saffron for dyes. But these did not loom large. Bartholomew Angelicus in the thirteenth century remarked: ‘Many medly beans with bread-corn’ and he cites the many stages needed for treating flax.
When the hop begins to wax, then the flax is drawn up and gathered all whole, and is then lined, and afterward made to knots and little bundles, and so laid in water, and lies there long time. And then it is taken out of the water and laid abroad till it be dried, and twined and wend in the sun, and then bound in pretty niches and bundles. And afterward knocked, beaten, and brayed, and carfled, rodded, and gnodded, ribbed and heckled, and at the last spun. Then the thread is sod and bleached, and bucked, and oft laid to drying, wetted and washed, and sprinkled with water until it be white, after divers working and travail.[487]
There was still no way of producing enough fodder to feed large herds through the winter, so animals were slaughtered when winter came and then salted. There is little evidence of any change in the nature of the crops since the Carolingian period. In the early centuries on some well organized estates perhaps a third of the arable soil may have been sown with spring crops, but mostly winter-sown bread grains predominated. However, as time went on, spring grains were no doubt more generally sown: barley, oats, according to circumstances. Where oats were sown in large quantities, it was not to provide fodder for horses, but to make the best use of the particular soil and climate. In England beans and peas were certainly not grown in significant amounts before the fourteenth century. We cannot make any strong distinction between two and three-field systems. The basis of rotation was throughout the cultura or furlong rather than the field. Spring crops were not necessarily the cause of reduction of fallow from a half to a third of the ploughed area. Many villages were able to put only half the arable under crop while they grew on that half a high proportion of spring crops, mostly barley and oats, that had a long history in the north.
Alexander Neckham in his De naturis rerum of the late twelfth century describes the two main farm machines, the plough and the cart; and in De utensilibus he tells how the prudent villein has wicker baskets and panniers, cheese moulds, sieve and bolter cloth for sifting meal and straining beer, spades, mattocks, a threshing sledge, a seed-bag for sowing. a wheelbarrow, a mouse-trap, a gin-snare for wolves, fire-hardened stakes, an axe for rooting up thorns and the like, butchers-broom to make and repair his yard-hedges, a small knife for grafting, a hoe and hook for weeding, nets and snares for hares and deer, and a gaff for fishing. Many herbs and vegetables were grown in cottage gardens. Neckham tells us expansively what should be planted in a noble’s garden — fruits, vegetables, herbs. The few flowers named all have their uses: rose, lily, viola, heliotrope, peony, daffodil, purple iris, yellow gladiolus. Herbs include lettuce, parsley, mint, sage. There are beds of onions, leeks, garlic, pumpkins, shallots, cucumber, with beet under pottage vegetables. Fruits include medlars, quinces, warden-trees (a pear), peaches, pears of St Riole, pomegranates, almonds and figs. For the truly keen growers: lemons, oranges, dates. (Apple or pear seem not to be considered a noble fruit. Pears are harmful unless taken with wine; and all soft fruit, including apples, should be eaten on an empty stomach, never after dinner.)[488]
Sheep were found everywhere in England from Anglo-Saxon days, but we find them especially in the marshlands of Essex, East Anglia and the fens. A record of 1160 mentions that Crowland Abbey had over two thousand sheep besides lambs at Monklode, with nearly as many at Langcroft. But there were also large-scale sheep farms in areas like the Breckland and on into the upland regions of Cambridgeshire, in other parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, in the west, in Dorset, and on parts of the Mendips. In areas with an exceptional amount of meadow, cows competed with ewes and goats in providing milk and cheese. Much cheese seems to have been produced in the Berkshire meadowlands. But it is rare to meet vaccaria in Domesday, and cows are seldom distinguished from other animalia ociosa. We meet a few sites specializing in horse-breeding, for instance William granted Westminster Abbey the tithe of a stud of two hundred horses somewhere in Surrey (probably in the hundred of Kingstone, where Domesday mentions the king’s forest mares). The abbey at Burton-on-Trent had a haraz or stud farm with seventy horses, including foals, under abbot Nigel, 1094-1114. The untamed mares at Brendon and the wild mares at Lynton seem to have been Exmoor ponies.[489]
But there is no sign of the breeding of work horses. It was long before the possibility of the horse’s traction power was realized. When the population began to increase considerably in the thirteenth century, men were not stimulated to make a more extensive use of horses and to provide more fodder for them. Rather, they took the easy way out by reducing fallow and using more ground for crops, with unfortunate results in the long term. The area of meadow and pasture was reduced, so that more cereals could be grown; as a result there was even less feed available for animals, so that their manure and traction power was lessened instead of increased. Peasant holdings became understocked and demesne flocks suffered from shortage of pasture. This setback occurred despite what seems to have been an increased use of horses in the later twelfth century, at least in seven contiguous counties in
eastern England: Norfolk, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire. Horses that seem to have been used in mixed teams or alone have been noted in twenty-three places there. But apart from some Yorkshire cases, the only other data suggesting a use of plough horses elsewhere
are some instauramentum figures in the Liber Henrici de Soliaco which may perhaps indicate that by 1189 they had begun to be combined with oxen on some of the Glastonbury manors, and two payments recorded in the Pipe Roll of 1166 — one for 10 horses and 6 oxen at Chelesherst (a lost village in Kent) and the other for 22 oxen and 2 horses that were provided for Washfield and Tiverton in Devon (Lenard).
In Bedfordshire in the later thirteenth century the horse called the affer or stort was indeed the draught beast of the poor man, while the lords preferred the ox.
Salt was much needed, especially for salting meat or fish for winter consumption. Saltpans appear in Domesday in every seaboard county from Lincolnshire to Cornwall. The single village of Caister in Norfolk had forty-five — though some such entries are composite, covering several settlements. In some places the saltpans were an important part of the economy, for example in Lyme in Dorset with twenty-seven saltworkers, ten villani, six bordars, and an unstated number of fishermen. The coastal saltpans seem to be let for rent to the workers. The works at the brine springs in Cheshire and Worcestershire were almost industrial settlements. Before 1066 at several sites such as Droitwich and Nantwich the king had taken two thirds of the income and the earl a third. After the Conquest there was a decline, even at Droitwich. But there were other works on rural manors, sometimes the manor owning only one or a part of one. In such cases the products were no doubt in the main used locally; but when there was a group of saltpans attached to a moderate-sized manor, the profits could be high. Saltpans needed fuel and thus affected the economy of near villages. Domesday shows that there was much traffic to the Cheshire wiches; tolls were paid for carts drawn by two or four oxen, for horse loads or for men carrying salt on their backs — with higher rates for those coming from another hundred or shire. Here the transport system was fairly humble; but when weighty objects were involved, large teams were used. For timber needed at Abingdon six waggons came all the way from Wales, each with twelve oxen; for the great bell cast in London for Durham, a team of twenty-two oxen was used. The timber carts took six or seven weeks on the round trip. In 1121 Henry I cleared and deepened Fossdyke, the canal linking Lincoln and Torksey; thus boats could go from the Wash to the Humber by inland waterways.
Fisheries were important in the fenlands, some river valleys, and parts of the coast. Domesday has many references to fisheries and renders of fish. A fishery there seems to be a fixed device of some kind such as a weir. Generally piscariae seem to be let for a rent of fish or money. In Shropshire we find five rented by villani; but at times one or more were reserved for supplying the lord’s hall. Apart from repairs now and then, they needed little care for the taking of eels or salmon. We meet village mills paying a rent of a thousand eels (apparently caught in eel traps), and occasionally a man called a piscator. Sea-fishers appear mainly in Suffolk and the eastern section of the south coast. Among freshwater fisheries, those of the eastern fens were outstanding. Only rarely was a fishery large enough to affect a village’s character, though there were exceptions in the west. At Etone (Eaton Hall) on the Dee above Chester a fishery rendered a thousand salmon.[490]
Watermills were to be found almost everywhere, though in no exact ratio to population or plough teams, and varying in value and capacity. Where we find a number close together we may be sure that the manorial mills ground more than the manor’s corn. The lords tried hard to keep a monopoly. When Cecily de Rumilly (1131-40) gave the Silsden mill to a priory, she denounced the use of handmills and threatened severe penalties for anyone evading the suit owed to her mill by sending a horseload of corn elsewhere. At times mills are described as serving the hall, but as a rule they were let at a fixed rent; payments were mostly in money but at times they seem to have been made in kind. Clusters sometimes appear in towns, for example Louth and Thetford. In construction they might be of the simple vertical axle variety or of the more complex geared kind (described by Vitruvius). The millwright who built or repaired the mill was not uncommon among villagers; and together with the blacksmith he accustomed them to new metallurgical and mechanical technology. In the eleventh century water-power was applied to other industrial processes. Trip-hammer devices were used in the forges and in watermills for fulling cloth.[491] Water-power was also used for forges, perhaps in England by 1086, certainly at Caraden in Catalonia in 1104 and Soroï, in Sweden in 1197. Domesday tells us little of the mill occupants; as custos we meet a Frenchman, a reeve and a sokeman. But twelfth-century surveys suggest that the miller was a peasant who also had an agricultural holding. Fractional ownerships (down to an eighth) occur, especially in Lincolnshire and Norfolk; perhaps a group of men, rather than the village community, got together to set up a mill in some such cases.
We meet a few references to mines, for example plumbariae at five sites in Derbyshire; and another place makes a render of lead. Lead was no doubt also worked in the Mendips and Shropshire, where production was going on in the later twelfth century. Domesday also mentions Cornwall; and silver-bearing leads seem to have been worked on Alston Moor near Carlisle under Henry I. References to iron-works or workers and to renders of iron imply more than smithies, and are widely spread, from Devon to Sussex and north to Cheshire or Lincolnshire. We find an association of iron-workers with ironstone outcrops and with woodlands. At Hessle, West Riding, the population consisted of six iron-workers and three bordars with a single plough.[492]
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Trade had been hampered to some extent by the Conquest. The Scandinavian links were dislocated; after 1071 Flanders was hostile and by 1074 relations with France were difficult. For a while economic development was held up, with a falling back from the expanded money system devised for the payment of mercenaries. Norman feudalism in some ways increased the particularism of the old English system to the extent that it cut the land into sharply defined manors; but at the same time, by strengthening the central grip of the government and increasing the demand for money rents, it set into action contrary movements, which made for economic advance. All the while there was a certain influx of foreign traders and craftsmen, who at times set up a community inside or outside an old borough, or settled by a new centre, often a castle. For a while the effects were slight. The Norman kings seem to have left things much as they found them in the towns, making few administrative changes and granting no new privileges. But the boroughs continued to grow slowly, until they began expanding in the middle of the twelfth century.
The origin of the English boroughs is uncertain. They were certainly not simply a development of Alfred’s fortified burhs, and their courts seem to be not municipal institutions, but merely the hundred courts that sat within the walls and extended their jurisdiction over the districts around. Clearly the growth of trade played a key part in creating a borough, which had civic consciousness of a new kind. The inhabitants were mostly free men, and before 1066 the term burgess applied to those of its folk who held property by a burgage tenure, under which their tenements (houses, shops or booths) paid a fixed money rent, were inheritable, and could be freely mortgaged or sold. There were none of the agricultural or other services attached to other tenures; and this fact played a great part in developing the peculiar social character of the boroughs. Guilds had appeared, which, whatever their original nature, were coming to include the leading merchants and to act as trade organizations; the new burgess way of life, with its strong trading characteristics, was already before 1066 building up its special set of rules later called borough customs. Moreover, burgesses may have begun to develop their own courts for dealing with the regulation of business affairs. In a few places the Norman castle was accompanied by a Norman borough, especially on the Welsh marches; such a borough was
granted the free customs of the small bourgs known in Normandy. The earl of Hereford was castellan of Breteuil, so he conferred that bourg’s customs on Hereford.[493]
What later brought about a uniform movement towards self-governing status was the sale of privileges to the boroughs by the kings. Henry I granted to the peasants of the royal borough of Cambridge a charter giving them a monopoly of river trade in the area. About 1120 at Leicester the citizens, tradition declared, gained one of their chief liberties in an odd way:
The jurors say on their oath that in the days of earl Robert, two cousins, to wit Nicholas son of Aco and Geoffrey son of Nicholas, waged trial of battle for a certain plot of land which each claimed for his own. And they fought from sunrise even to noon and longer; and as they thus fought, one of them drove the other to the verge of a little ditch. And as they stood there on the verge and would have fallen in, his cousin said to him, ‘take heed of the ditch behind you or you’ll fall into it.’ At that there arose so great a shouting and tumult from those who sat or stood around, that the lord earl heard their clamour even in his castle and asked then what it might be. And men answered him that two cousins were fighting for a plot of land and one had driven the other to the ditch and warned him that he stood on the brink and would have fallen in. So the burgesses, moved with pity, made a covenant with the lord earl that they should give him threepence yearly for each house that had a gable in the High Street, on condition of his granting them [the right of judging their own pleas by a jury of twenty-four citizens]: which right the lord earl granted them.[494]