The other possibility for increasing profits was to decrease expenditure on taxes, rents, and ceremony. As we have just noted, ceremonial expenses, particularly for funerals, became increasingly important in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, so that few cuts could be made in that area. In the dues paid to the lord and state, however, some cuts were made in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taxes to the state to support the Hundred Years' War had been crushing during the fourteenth century and were one of the chief contributors to the outbreak of the Peasant Revolt of 1381.9 Following the revolt and throughout the fifteenth century taxes and purveyances of goods from the peasants decreased. Furthermore, the peasants increasingly refused either to perform or pay for the old servile-labor requirements. While they were willing to pay rents to lords for land, they would not pay the old dues of serfdom. Thus in the fifteenth century, along with more land and better wages for labor, peasants enjoyed a decrease in the drains of money to state and lords.10
Assets of the Peasant Family
To meet the demands on their resources, peasant households had three basic assets: their land, family labor, and capital (livestock, household goods, silver spoons and coins, and tools). As we have seen, the size of the landholdings varied considerably in the village from those having thirty acres or more to those having five acres or less. The amount of land a family held could also depend on the regional economy. In the rich fenland area large families could be supported on five to ten acres by exploiting the fens for game, fish, rushes, and grazing." If the family had sufficient capital assets, they could also add to their land by renting parcels, buying them, acquiring them as dowry, or clearing them and claiming them through assarts. As we have seen, there was an active land market for odd acres of land. For the most part, it was the primary villagers who expanded their production by acquiring more land or purchasing more acres in order to establish their sons in separate households.'2 With land readily available in the fifteenth century, we have seen that wealthy fathers could easily establish all sons with separate tenements during their lifetime.
The family provided most of the labor in house and fields, but not exclusively. A variety of factors determined the labor patterns. Life cycle would certainly have played a significant role. Families with young children would hire help for their intensive periods of cultivation, if they could afford it. But the family always had to balance the number of mouths it could feed with the amount of productive labor in the household. A poor family could not afford to hire help even during this crucial period, as the "Song of the Husbandman" shows so movingly. The husband plows while his wife goads the ox. Her bleeding feet are wrapped in rags and at the end of the land their infant child lies in a bowl, and twins, two years old, cry from cold and hunger.i3 Widows with young children and families at the end of the life cycle, in old age or disability, might hire labor or rent out land if there was insufficient family labor.14 Wealthy villagers, whatever family help was available, routinely hired laborers for harvest and employed servants from the village youth to help cultivate their extensive lands and aid their wives with brewing and other supplemental economic activities. These primary villagers were the most likely to be indicted for receiving people out of tithing because they were the chief village employers.15 The optimal situation for a peasant family to work their land was for the husband and wife to be in their prime and have a few teenage children who could help with fieldwork and housework.
Both custom and efficiency tended to divide family labor into separate spheres according to sex and age. As we shall see in subsequent chapters in this section, the husbandman's work was chiefly in field and forest while women worked mostly about the home. Children did herding, errands, and other tasks both in the home and field.
Labor need not be solely fieldwork. Modern historians mistakenly assume that peasants were like pioneers and that households made their own cloth, clothing, tools, beer, bread, and buildings. But as common surnames such as Carpenter, Smith, Brewster, Fuller, and Tailor indicate, the society was actually one that relied heavily on specialized services. Rather than trying to put together the complicated crucks for their houses, peasants engaged a carpenter. Many peasant women did not bake their own bread but bought it from a neighbor who specialized in baking and had invested in a large oven. For the most part, clothing was made by tailors and only rough cloth was produced at home. The village craftsmen who practiced trades such as smithing, milling, and tinkering usually also held some land in the village and practiced their crafts only part-time, as a supplement to their agricultural endeavors. They received their pay in money or in the equivalent amount of goods or services. In the latter form of payment, they might enter into a reciprocity relationship with a fellow villager for whom they worked, as is common in peasant societies.
The poll taxes provide a profile of different villages, illustrating the variety of occupations. In the 1379 poll tax, Skipton, which had a large number of craftsmen and tradesmen (twenty-four) was still predominantly agrarian. And Kettlewell, a largely agrarian village, had thirtyfour agricultural laborers, one cattle buyer, eleven servants, but only three craftsmen. Craftsmen that appeared in the poll tax lists included tailors, dyers, drapers, carpenters, smiths, brewers, millers, tinkers, and so on. The variety of artisans in a village depended on the regional specialties-that is, cattle-producing regions were more likely to have cattle buyers while wool-producing regions had more people in cloth production. As in the Skipton and Kettlewell examples, not all villages would have the same mix of agricultural compared to artisanal resi- dents.16
In addition to the fields and family labor to make them productive, peasants' capital investments were of major importance. Livestock was so significant that dowries were often composed of animals, and the routine bequest to brothers, sisters, servants, and godchildren were animals. Livestock became even more important during the fifteenth century as more arable was converted to grazing lands. Ideally, the peasant establishment contained at least two plow oxen or horses, and most of the yardlanders and half-yardlanders had these or more. But poorer families might have to rent or borrow plow teams in exchange for money or their labor. The large domestic animals were expensive both to buy and to feed, so that owning them was necessarily limited to those of means. Even for these families the heriot of the best beast to the lord and the second best for mortuary to the Church, when the peasant father died, could leave the son who inherited the home tenement strapped during his first years. As we have seen, almost all families could keep a sheep or two, pigs, chickens, and so on, but only those with access to generous pastures could have large herds of sheep and profit from the sale of their wool. By the fifteenth century herding became more common and the yeomen often had herds of over a hundred sheep.
Metal was dear throughout the Middle Ages, so that possession of a plow and iron field implements was a major capital investment. So, too, were the brewing and cooking pots of the peasant women. Thus access to good equipment and supplemental economic pursuits such as brewing for public consumption tended to be open only to the more prosperous peasants.
Supplemental Economic Activities
While land, labor, and capital were the basic assets of the family economy, villagers engaged in a number of other economic activities to supplement these resources. All status groups in the village sought supplemental sources of food and income, but the options available to them depended on their capital resources and the time they had to devote to them.
Seeking wages as a supplement to an income from agriculture was common. For cottars some wages or a cottage industry was essential. Produce from their few acres of land could only provide the sparsest living, so that both the husband and wife would have to seek outside income. In the lean years preceding the Black Death, wages were low and competition for employment intense in the overcrowded island. But wages rose immediately following the first wave of the Black Death and remained high until the end of the fifteenth century. Thus wage labor became a mor
e attractive option during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and many people with marginal holdings simply abandoned their land and sought the highest wages that they could get by migrating.
Cottars were not the only ones competing for wage-earning positions. Wealthy villagers with plows, carts, and other equipment often hired themselves and their equipment to make extra money. Furthermore, if primary or secondary villagers had more than enough labor for their own fields, they sent some of their adolescent children to work for wages elsewhere. Some of these younger siblings in a family would remain wage workers, because the family could not afford to purchase extra land for them to establish themselves in the same social status in which they were raised. For others, the period of wage work or servitude was a temporary one and they returned to the family lands when their parents retired. When adolescents did leave the home economy and work for wages or as servants elsewhere, it is not clear whether they were expected to revert part of their wages to the parental household. Indirect evidence suggests that they kept their wages and purchased parcels of land and arranged their own marriages."
Cottage industries of various sorts also supplemented family income. Women's contribution to the home economy, in addition to routine work in house, field, and garden, included a variety of additional activities that brought in extra income. Spinning was the most apparent of women's work and the distaff was a medieval peasant woman's symbol. But brewing was a lucrative side occupation for peasant women, particularly, as we shall see, among those of the primary village families who could afford caldrons and capital outlays for malt necessary to brew on a large scale. Weaving was not a common cottage industry until the latter half of the fifteenth century, when it became a major supplemental activity. In herding districts the makers of butter and cheese also brought in a bit of extra cash. Because family labor was relatively cheap and the profits from utilizing it were high for the unit as a whole, various labor-intensive supplemental activities were common. Thus beating flax and making linen thread, while arduous and time-consuming work, were profitable for the peasants)
All peasants, unless they lived in rough and hilly territory or in borderland regions, had ready access to a market town in which they sold their surplus agricultural goods or the fruits of their labor. The more fortunate peasants sold livestock and excess grain along with the housewife's eggs, butter, and thread. Others sold items that they had gathered or grown in their gardens. Isabella and her husband, Paganus Horn of Saham, for instance, had gathered rushes and took them by boat to sell at market in Cambridge. Some of the cottars bought stalls in local market towns and took neighbors' surpluses for sale, thus acting as middlemen for villagers at the market.19 Proceeds from the sales were spent on household goods such as pottery, on agricultural equipment, and on such small luxuries as dates or raisins for a holiday pudding.
Taking in lodgers was as important a supplement to medieval peasant families as it was to twentiety-century urban families. Since inns were not a routine feature of the countryside, travelers sought shelter for the night in private homes. People in search of work or those who had found employment in a village also rented room in village houses. Thus lodgers sometimes appear in peasant houses in reports of accidental deaths and of some of the homicides. Maude of London, for instance, was described as a lodger at Emma Harlewyne's house, where she killed Emma's daughters and stole the goods of the house. People taking in lodgers knew surprisingly little about their guests, often not even inquiring their names. Thus a seventeen-year-old youth, whose name was not known, died when his bed caught fire; and William le Engleys, who had an extra house that he rented, did not know the name of the group that lived in it. Money was sufficient contract for renting.20
Hunting and gathering were among the routine supplements of peasant households for all status groups. We tend to associate these activities with an earlier, more primitive economy, but they played an important role in the well-being of the peasantry. Many of the items hunted and gathered were controlled by the lord, and peasants caught with them were fined-a sure sign that they played a significant role in the rural economy. Collecting nuts and fruit or taking brush from the lord's hedgerows or forest were offenses punishable by fine. Fines were often so low that, even if caught, it was still profitable to gather. For instance, stealing a whole cartload of brush and firewood brought a fine of only 6d. in Wakefield. Fines were also imposed on hunting and keeping hunting dogs, and peasants caught with venison, rabbits, and squirrels paid heavily for their illicit protein. A Wakefield woman spent three weeks in prison for a dead hare found in her yard, as did a man for taking a rabbit from the field. Killing a deer cost 20s. Even access to some fishing remained in the lord's preserve. Much of the gathering was done by children, servants, and housewives. Men did the hunting, but boys were sent out to fish.21
Another routine source of food and petty economic advantage came from trespasses. In folklore the image of the scheming, avaricious, tightfisted peasant is common, and examples from the manorial courts confirm it. In trespass cases, for instance, people were accused of deliberately breaking down hedges so that their animals could eat the lord's crops; or they allowed the animals on the fields before all the gleaning was done; or they gleaned illegally. Trespasses could be very petty; for example one person was accused of bleeding another's animal in order to make blood sausage. Such trespasses, however, could be profitable. One was not always caught and it was often possible to make a settlement lower than the value of the trespass. If one trespassed against the lord, the low fines meant that the trespass, as in the case of illegal gleaning,was profitable even if one was caught.22
Theft could also augment the regular agricultural income. The most commonly stolen items were livestock, particularly the valuable horses, sheep, and cattle. Cloth, grain, and valuables were also prized objects of theft. Neighbor stole from neighbor in the same village in a third of both the larceny and burglary cases. In 15 percent of the larceny cases and in 21 percent of the burglary cases the victim and accused lived only one to five miles from each other. In all felonies, about half of the victims and accused knew each other well and stole, received, or murdered within a fifteen-mile radius of their residence. Thefts from larceny rarely exceeded Cl and a third of them were under 12d., petty larcenies that would not lead to a sentence of capital punishment. Burglary was considerably more profitable than larceny, although it required more skill and planning to execute. Robbery was not a routine crime for the ordinary peasant, but was generally committed by strongarmed robbers who were strangers to the community. Profits from illegal acquisitions were fairly good considering other supplemental economic activities, and punishment, although severe, was not likely to be imposed. Of those who were caught and tried for their crimes only 23 percent were found guilty.23
Because trespass and petty theft were so profitable, they attracted participants from all status groups in the villages. A linking of criminal cases with village reconstitution studies from the Ramsey Abbey villages indicated that the bulk of those indicted for felonies (80 percent) were primary and secondary villagers rather than cottars and laborers. These people had more to gain through their thefts and tended to steal items of relatively high value, while the poorer elements of the community tended to steal poultry and grain, which were often of insufficient value to be counted as felonies. Since primary villagers dominated the judicial system, they could be fairly sure of receiving acquittals for their criminal activities. Cottars, on the other hand, could be punished in the community. In general, the criminal and trespass interactions among community members indicate that illegal advantages were not shunned by the villagers and that all status groups practiced them. The wives of primary villagers were just as likely, if not more so, to glean illegally as the village poor. And the well-established village reeve or juror could use his position to protect himself from being hanged for stealing a neighbor's horse.24
One must strive for balance, however, in looking at village dynamics. Th
e shrewd peasant is but one side of our perceptions of peasants. The obverse is that cooperation and neighborliness were needed to make the community function smoothly. Reciprocity arrangements included exchange of labor, equipment, and food. As we have commented, the peasants were a sociable lot who exchanged meals and expected distributions of food at weddings and funerals. Formal ties of village ceremonies and festivals became increasingly important in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and social-religious gilds, which we will discuss in the final section of the book, attempted to institutionalize village cooperation.
Individual networks of cooperation and reciprocity among villagers helped them to meet the everyday problems of plowing and building and to cushion crises when they occurrred. The arrangements for mutual assistance were often informal ones between neighbors, but when the undertakings were not honored, the cases appear in manorial court and give us a glimpse into the workings of these reciprocal agreements. A study of debt litigation in Writtle (Essex) shows that 17 percent of all debts that came into court were reciprocal. For instance, two men joined together in 1393 to buy a saw with the agreement that they would act together as sawyers for six months out of every year. Similar arrangements were made for the purchase of carts, and even the borrowing of plow animals, cattle, and other such items were arranged by contracts that could be appealed in court. Such cases indicated how widows arranged to have farmwork done and how neighbors worked as a team in investments and in marketing items. A young man with a family, for instance, might agree to provide labor for a widow in exchange for aid in purchasing a tenement.25
The networks of peasants on Redgrave manor indicates that, for the most part many-stranded relationships with other villagers were more common among the middling peasants, peaking with those holding three to ten acres, than either the upper- or lower-status groups. They relied on one another for loans of equipment and money as well as for assistance in labor. For them, cooperation was essential in order to profit economically. Their social interactions were not always ones of mutual assistance and pledging, but even the trespasses and assaults among members of this status group show that their interactions were mor frequent than those of the other two groups. Wealthier peasants did not have to rely on such complex ties of reciprocity, but instead owned the equipment that they needed and could afford to hire wage laborers when they wanted extra help. Only in hamlets did the wealthier peasants rely on more complex economic and social ties. While wealthy peasants had no need for mutual aid arrangements, the village poor could not enter into them because they had very little to offer by way of reciprocity with anyone else. When they entered into a relationship with another person, such as over debt or pledging, it tended to be dyadic and involve specific transactions. Thus a man who worked as a laborer contracted with his master, and a person with one acre, who supplemented his income with a market stall, had contacts with others in the market.26
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