I have also been asked if I am depressed by reading stories that continually end tragically. A few cases are so vivid that they haunt mein particular the case of the trained bear who escaped from his room in the cellar of an inn and made his way to the top rooms, where he mauled a sleeping girl. But in other cases one only sees ordinary human folly end in an accident. Typical is a case in which a cart carrying three men became stuck in the mud. One man got out to urge the horses on, another went behind to push the cart, and the third, also wanting to be helpful, got in front of the stuck wheel and gave it a pull. The cart dislodged and rolled over him, crushing him. Mostly one feels awed at the overwhelming sense of being at the scene, a feeling that both Homans and Bennett had strived for.
More traditional sources have also played a major role in this study. The manorial court rolls are rich in information on the family. I am indebted to those who published the rolls and to those historians who have done village-reconstitution studies based on them. But, again, I have approached the manorial court records from a somewhat different perspective than Homans did. Rather than trying to establish the exact rules of inheritance, for instance, I looked at the occasions when these rules were applied and found that the villagers appealed to them primarily when other arrangements had not been made or there was a dispute among the heirs. The more individually tailored inheritances were also routinely recorded and superseded the inheritance rules. I also looked at nontraditional economic relationships such as retirement contracts, reciprocity, and hunting and gathering. Perhaps more than Homans and Bennett, I was less interested in establishing the rules and regularity that were supposed to govern life and was more concerned with the way peasant households actually functioned.
Wills, which are not common for the peasantry until rather late in the fifteenth century, provided a quantity of information on inheritance as well as on attitudes toward godchildren, parents, and spouses, and on material comfort. A variety of other primary sources yielded surprising information. A proof of English ancestry, which York required for tradesmen suspected of being Scots, supplied valuable evidence on godparents and naming patterns. Homilies and popular advice books for parish priests gave not only spiritual advice on family but practical counseling as well. The church court records contained valuable information on divorce and marital and sexual difficulties.
Literary sources also contributed to the study, particularly the admirable modern collections of medieval folk carols and lyrics. I also referred to ballads, but with caution, for these were not recorded until the eighteenth century and some scholars would argue that they should not be used for medieval evidence. I have chosen not to rely heavily on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Langland's Piers Plowman because they have already been drawn on heavily for social evidence and because, being a "higher" type of literary output, they may suffer from the authors' prejudices and literary distortions. I preferred to build my case from peasant sources as much as possible.
In looking over the various types of information that I have collected on the English peasant family of the late Middle Ages, I seem to have shining nuggets and illuminating bits of data-not the sorts of materials that permit one to weave a tapestry of history, but rather to create a mosaic. It will be a richly colored one, however, and I hope it will please the eye of the reader.
A commonplace in describing peasants is that they are bound to the ground or chained to the soil, so that it is appropriate to begin a discussion of peasant families by looking at their material environment: their fields, villages, and houses. The fields were of primary importance in providing the peasants grain and fodder for their animals. Another common phrase, "Man does not live by bread alone," is a useful reminder that social interactions, as well as economic necessity, influenced field use and residential plans. Village landscapes, through constant usage, became the social setting for the peasantry. Indeed, their marks on the land are their most enduring memorials, for the ridges and furrows of their fields and the remains of roads, ditches, and house sites are still prominent on the English landscape centuries after medieval peasant cultivation ceased. Tied to the soil, they made it their own.
At one time it seemed that most of what we would know about the material environment would come from aerial photography, careful observation of the landscape, manorial records, and some literary and artistic evidence. In the last twenty years, however, archaeology has added significantly to our understanding of village sites and the layout of village houses. Archaeology, however, provides a two-dimensional picture. The coroners' inquests and manorial court rolls permit us to see the upper parts of those houses and something of the village and home dynamics. These records people the landscape and archaeological remains.
Village and field origins have long been a subject of learned discussion, but for the current study we need only describe them briefly in order to set the stage for our investigation of peasant families. England has been broadly divided into two types of field systems, woodland and champion. The woodland had small clusters of houses (hamlets) or individual homesteads surrounded by square and rectangular fields marked out by ditches, walls, and hedgerows. Such fields and settlement arrangements resembled our modern conception of farms, although the actual divisions of labor and land usage might be among the residents rather than falling to individual families. Champion country was characterized by nucleated villages surrounded by large, open, unhedged fields. The size of the villages and the surrounding fields varied considerably with the type of soil available and the historic foundation of the village, so that the average number of houses or acres is a meaningless figure. There were small villages of under a thousand acres, but some were closer to five thousand. The distinction between village and hamlet is likewise flexible, and hamlets and farmsteads were mixed among the villages. Sometimes the presence or absence of a parish church or the size of the population has been used to differentiate the two, but the two terms blended and were not as significant as the differences in field structures.
In champion, or open-field, agriculture the village lands were divided into two, three, or more large fields in which a villager held strips scattered throughout the different fields and intermingled among those of his neighbors. In a sense, therefore, the village was a cluster of individual holdings. It was the cultivation of individual strips in fields that give them their characteristic washboard appearance on the landscape. The strips were cultivated on a system of crop rotation agreed upon by the village. Part of the land lay fallow while the rest was cultivated. In addition to the village fields there were often permanent meadow, wooded lands, and perhaps a stream or fish ponds. The open fields with their thousand or so acres of arable land provided sweeping vistas unhindered by the hedges that gave the woodland country its choppy appearance.'
The areas of predominantly champion, as opposed to woodland, have been reconstructed both from medieval evidence and from the later Acts of Enclosure.2 To sketch the distribution one should imagine a broad band running diagonally across England from the North Sea coast through the Midlands to the channel on the south. Left out of this central band are the west country counties of Cornwall and Devon; the northwestern counties of Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, and Cumberland; and the southeast counties of Essex, Middlesex, and Kent. Other counties such as Surrey, Suffolk, and Hertfordshire had a mixture of the two field types. To say that the diagonal, central band contained mostly open-field agriculture is not to exclude hamlets and farmsteads from these regions as well.
The field systems began to change in the period covered by this study and, indeed, that is one of the reasons for looking at family during the late Middle Ages. In response to the contraction of population after the Black Death, the process of enclosure of open fields became more frequent. Agriculture shifted from primarily grain production to a greater emphasis on livestock rearing. Open fields required herders for livestock, but by dividing and hedging the fields herders could be dispensed with. The new hedges altered the character- of ch
ampion country. The process of enclosure had started early in places such as Norfolk, but was not completed until the nineteenth century. Enclosures were not necessarily accompanied by the evictions and suffering we associate with the Tudor period, but were a result of a necessary adjustment in land use in response to a decrease in laborers and consumers of grain. Land that had been difficult and marginal to farm was abandoned first and turned into grazing lands. The villages that were deserted during this process of diminishing arable have provided the archaeological sites for village studies.
Village locations depended on terrain and the availability of land, but probably the most important consideration was ready access to drinking water. The great landscape historian W. G. Hoskins has recommended to local historians that they look for the village well to find evidence of the original village site,3 but streams and shallow cisterns were also used as water sources. Beyond the availability of water, terrain was important. In the Fenland the "islands" were favored because they were drier. Although defensive positions on hills were not characteristic of English village sites, there was a preference for places that provided good drainage and flat areas for building.' In the thirteenth century, when the land was rapidly populated, daughter villages and hamlets sometimes had to locate in less desirable places to be near new fields.
The village lands were divided into three distinct regions. At the center were the cluster of enclosures that contained peasants' houses, outbuildings, and gardens. The agricultural area, both fields and meadow, surrounded the village and at its perimeter was a rough area of woods.5 By the thirteenth century population had grown so that village boundaries were pushed to their limits against the fields of other villages, and in some areas the village boundaries were demarcated by strips of greensward.6 The peasantry were by no means isolated in their village and the protecting rough. To prohibit encroachment of neighboring peasants, they held an annual perambulation of the boundaries, beating of the bounds, to establish their turf. They also had contacts with neighboring villages and market towns. A daily round of interaction was within a radius of five miles from the village.?
Because the manor was an administrative unit, not an agricultural one, the village and manor did not necessarily coincide. The manors were often imposed later than the establishment of the village. A village might be all in one manor or it might be divided between two or three different manors. If the village was divided between several manors, there were not separate fields, but rather the strips of one manor were interspersed with those of another. In villages that were divided between administrative units, the villagers themselves took a greater role in regulating agrarian practices and village bylaws were developed to establish land usage.' The division of villages among two or more lords or the transfer of a village from one lordship to another had little effect on the peasantry unless one lordship was harsher than another.9
The methods and reasons for the distribution of strips to villagers in open fields need not detain us, but the units and amount of land villagers held is important. The large fields were divided by fiscal units: virgates (yardlands) or bovates (oxgangs). The virgate reflects measurement with a rod while the bovate indicates that the land unit was assessed by the plowing capacity of oxen. The units varied somewhat from place to place, but a virgate averaged thirty acres and a bovate, fifteen acres. Kent and East Anglia had a local variation of assessment, the sulung. Glebe land, that belonging to the parish church, was mixed in with the villagers' strips and so might be the demesne land (that which the lord held for his own exploitation). Demesne could, however, be held in blocks of strips, and even among the peasants there was some tendency to try to accumulate holdings in a contiguous grouping.
An individual's holding in the arable varied considerably by the fourteenth century. The traditional holding was one virgate or two bovates, but it is entirely possible that in the original land distributions there were inequalities, with some people having only a few acres and others only half-virgates. Certainly, by the thirteenth century, as a result of land shortage, an active land market, and other factors, small units of an acre or less might comprise a family's sole holding. Other families had been able to accumulate more than the thirty acres, so that decided inequalities in landholding appeared among the villagers by the fourteenth century. In general, however, those with half a virgate predominated in the villages. As the fifteenth century progressed, the inequalities in land distribution became even more pronounced. Some peasants abandoned land while others accumulated larger holdings from the vacated lands. Those holding more than a virgate became more numerous.10
In addition to having a share of the arable land, peasants had usage of meadowland, wastes, woodlands, and pastures. Since artificial grasses were not grown as crops in the Middle Ages, meadows provided the only source of hay to tide animals over the winter. Village bylaws regulated pasturage carefully, allowing villagers to keep only a fixed number of animals on the open fields and setting the times of pasturing. Wastes were also used for pasture and for the various extra food sources that grew there: berries, nuts, greens, mushrooms, and fruit. The woodland provided fuel, building materials for houses, acorns and beechnuts for feeding hogs, and were a source of illicit protein in the form of deer, fowl, and other wild animals. In some areas the woods were still wild and bear wandered out, occasionally mauling a village child."
Moving in from the fields to the village perimeter, ditches, hedges, or lanes marked the end of the arable and the beginning of the village. Bylaws governed the keeping of these barriers so that animals could not stray into crops or be allowed in the newly harvested fields until the villagers agreed.12
In the competition for food and a livelihood from the land, boundaries were important to medieval peasants. In the champion country the greensward demarcated one village's fields from its neighbor's. Within the fields themselves boundaries between strips were also necessary, because one of the most common petty thefts was to plow or reap into a neighbor's furrows. The jurors of Hemingford Abbots complained about Thomas Jordan, saying that by plowing he had appropriated a whole furlong to himself and that, when he and his servants mowed, they encroached on his neighbor's land. 13 Complaints concerning violation of strips were common in manor courts, but strip boundaries were marked only by stones and stakes, so that it was easy to plow an extra furrow to the damage of a neighbor.
Maintenance of boundaries elicited strong emotional responses. Fights with neighboring villages occurred at the beating of the bounds, and people who lived outside the village were called strangers and foreigners and were treated with suspicion. Jurors from the Ramsey Abbey villages convicted 37.5 percent of the outsiders who committed felonies (larceny, burglary, robbery, homicide, rape, arson, and receiving stolen goods or known felons) within their boundaries but only 18 percent of fellow villagers. Violations of field and hedge boundaries could lead to fights to the death. The majority of homicides occurred in village fields (59 percent), particularly during plowing or harvest, when competition for crops was at its keenest in peasant communities.14
Within the village peasant families had a croft, messuage, or close, as the bit of land surrounding the house was called. It was enclosed by ditches, walls, or hedges and was used for garden, house, barn, and perhaps other outbuildings belonging to the family. The word toft is sometimes used to describe the house site in the croft. Croft sizes varied, as did a family's landholding. Some were large enough for substantial gardens and several outbuildings, while others were only large enough to contain a cottage and limited garden.
Even a simple description of land distribution and house sites indicates that the villages were not occupied by peasant families of equal wealth and status. The village population included virgaters with sufficient land to easily support a family and produce for the market; half-virgaters, who could assume to support a family; and cottages, who would have only a small croft and a few acres in the open fields. Those with little land supplemented their livelihood by hirin
g out their labor or practicing a craft. For instance, a smith in Stotford, Bedfordshire, in 1276 was described as having one cow, a crop of a half acre of drege, and three rods of oats. His total worth in movable goods was only 8s.15
Village layouts showed a considerable variations. Geographers have tried to classify different plans from existing villages and from later maps, but because there was such an extensive rebuilding of houses and villages from 1570 to 1640, this information is unreliable." The best evidence on village plans comes from aerial photographs of over two thousand late medieval deserted villages. These photographs show deep roadways running through villages, ditches and mounds of crumbled walls that marked the sites of crofts and houses, and lanes into the fields. Such evidence indicates that in some villages crofts were strung along the main road, either on one side or on both, in a linear pattern. Others had a radial pattern where several roads met. Some villages had greens in their center or next to the church while others had market areas.] 7 No standard or even regional village plan prevailed, and there is increasing evidence that their layouts changed.
Medieval villages appear to have been in continual flux, changing location, distribution of plots, size, and boundaries. In the period of expanding population in the thirteenth century, some villages seem to have responded to the need for new housing by completely redoing their village plans. In Norfolk villages may have moved from arable land to waste sites in order to accommodate more rational land use.1' In Bardolfeston (Dorset) and Wharram Percy (Yorkshire) similar replanning was done, but, rather than moving the site, the location of crofts and houses was made more regular.19 The usual accommodation, however, was to extend the village area along the roadway running through it or to add lanes and streets as new housing sites were needed. The growth was largely haphazard.
The Ties That Bound Page 3