The pursuit of economic advantage could easily move beyond selfhelp and become a malicious attack on another villager. When one first meets Roger, son of Amabel, in the Wakefield manor court in 1315, he appears to be one of those villagers who continually lived on the other side of the bylaws. He was charged with the escape of two swine, for taking 10d. from one man and 20d. from another, and bribed his way out of an indictment for killing a doe. The same court session a group of men charged that he had burgled a house ten years earlier and had not been arrested; that he had kept the chattels of a brother who had been hanged as a felon; and had made enclosures to the damage of his neighbors. He was forced to make a large fine of 53s. 4d. and find pledges. He countered these charges in a later court, having had the record searched to prove that the charge of burglary had been malicious when it was raised twenty years before (not ten as his accusers charged) and that he had been "solemnly" acquitted at that time. He sued his persecutors for ,C40 in damages and the court agreed to award him 100s. He had a hard time collecting the money.32 With neighbors such as these it is easy to see why men turned readily to assaults and homicides in the struggle for economic advantage.
As we mentioned in the last chapter, peasants were locked into manipulating their assets and seeking small economic advantages within the system unless they were able to decrease expenditures. Ceremonial expenses, as we indicated, became more burdensome after the Black Death, but the dues paid to lords decreased substantially as peasants both bought their way off the manor and refused either to work the lord's land or pay a monetary substitute. A study of manors in East Anglia outlines the process of change. Before the Black Death the lord relied on his bond tenants at least to do the harvest work, although he commuted plow services and other occasional labor. But there was no indication that serfdom or labor rents substituting for actual work was undermined. By 1378, however, some 250 acres of land that had been in the hands of tenants paying labor services was let to different tenants for a term of years or by the year and without payment for labor services. Both the death of tenants from plague and the flight of tenants from the manor explains the erosion of serfdom. Before the Black Death only two tenants had waived their tenements, and they did so because of weakness or poverty. But following the plague there was a steady erosion of tenants, particulary from those tenements most heavily burdened with labor services. In other words, peasants were willing, following the Black Death, to leave the family lands that were encumbered with serfdom and seek their fortunes elsewhere.
From the lord's point of view, serfs became less valuable. By the end of the fourteenth century half the demesne land was rented and the chief profits came from this rent. Serfs, however, were still useful in repairing demesne buildings, but chiefly because they still paid merchet and various other dues.
Flight from the land in East Anglia was gradual. The leases for a year or a term of years were at the lord's will and did not include the traditional guarantees of inheritance that went with bond land. Those who left early usually had small holdings requiring heavy service. Those who remained after 1373 had large holdings with light services. Furthermore, they were among the people who leased the demesne. Thus in 1400 there were at least sixteen servile families with large landholdings still on Forncett manor. By 1500 the number was reduced to eight, and by 1575 serfs ceased to exist on the manor.
The experience of some tenants in this period of flux appears in the records. The Brakests were a large family in 1400. Three men and three women already lived outside the manor by 1406, and three more bondmen relinquished their land in 1409. Orders to seize the fugitives failed to produce them. William Brakest stayed on his messuage and fourteen acres until he died in 1428, leaving the land to his brother and heir, Richard. But Richard alienated it to a different family. He stayed on in Forncett for a few years and then moved to Metfield, Suffolk, where he paid the chevage to remain abroad. When he left Metfield, however, he no longer paid, and the family disappeared from the records. The Hillyng family, on the other hand, stayed on the land throughout the fifteenth century. One branch held 131 acres in 1433, 181 acres in 1469, and 201 acres in 1493. These acres represented only the holdings on that particular manor, for when the last male of the line died in 1509 his will stated that he had 25 acres in Forncett but also had land on five other manors. The Houlot family did very well indeed by staying on the manor. When Robert Houlot died in 1401 he left his daughter 160 acres, but that was only part of his wealth. Apparently he had sublet 236 acres of land on questionable leases and the lord seized it. Not all who remained prospered in the fifteenth century, and some died very poor and without heirs on their few acres.
Because the serfs who left were required to pay chevage for being off the manor, we have some idea of the experiences of this group as well. Of the serfs who left Forncett between 1400 and 1575, 126 had migrated to sixty-four different places. The largest number went to villages within a radius of ten miles, another 30 percent went to villages ten to twenty miles away, and 17 percent went farther afield. Norwich, about twelve miles from the manor, attracted twenty-two of the serfs. Of those whose occupations are known, some became weavers, tailors, saddlers, and other craftsmen. Others became agricultural laborers or took up tenements in other manors.33
Working as a laborer had great attractions following the Black Death, as the complaints of violation of the Statute of Labourers makes abundantly clear. Wage labor had always been an important part of the peasant economy and laborers were obviously carefully attuned to the value of their labor on the market. As soon as laborers realized that their labor was in demand following the first wave of plague, they immediately responded to the market and raised their wages. The king's council responded almost immediately in the spring of 1350, trying to keep the wages at the 1347 level, Like most attempts to legislate against the law of supply and demand, their ordinance and the later Statute of Labourers in 1351 failed. The complaints against laborers that appear in violations of the statute indicate the type of recompense that laborers wanted. They foremost wanted freedom to move about to procure the best wage that they could. They did not want to be tied to the manor and have to work for free or at a lower price than the going rate in another region. They preferred to work by the day rather than take a yearly wage; and if they did so, they demanded a very high yearly wage to make up for losses they would incur by not moving to a higher-paying job in the winter. They also preferred to have all their wages in money rather than in the old style of meals, grain, and money.34
Even with the dramatically changed economic opportunities that permitted higher wages and the possibility of throwing off the servile status, the results of the peasants' different strategies were mixed. Some of the bond tenants who remained on the land acquired vast landholdings and subtenants. Others died poor. Those who left the cumbersome servile ties behind gained independence, but not necessarily fortunes, as craftsmen and laborers. Those who moved to other manors may or may not have made fortunes as freemen. But it is quite apparent that peasants were willing to take the risk of leaving family land and traditional holdings as freemen rather than remaining bondmen. Not every peasant family emerged in the fifteenth century as yeomen, but those who did made their position well known to their less fortunate neighbors.
Amidst such major changes as the demise of serfdom, much remained the same. Peasant men competed for an edge by trespassing and relied on each other for aid and loans. Poaching and gathering still provided supplements to the diet, and wives added their share by brewing, spinning, and doing the housework. Heiresses were, as usual, valued as marriage partners. Whether free or villein the husbandman's year remained the same, as did many of the other economic strategies. The new economic conditions did not change the calendar of agriculture and men still tilled the soil as they had before. A man's daily routine was succinctly summarized by his neighbors in a coroner's inquest. William the Red and John of Goldingdon had a disagreement concerning sheep and had attacked each other with axes.
But they recovered from their wounds and were reconciled at the time that John died of a fever. The jurors told the coroner that in the interval between the fight and his death John "went to his work in the fields, to markets and to wrestling matches" as was usual.35
A woman's work is never done, we say, and yet we do not know what work rural women did in the late Middle Ages. The hours must have been very long and the work hard, for the only literary piece that speaks of the peasant woman's day with envy is that old saw of the tyrannical husband who taunts his wife into changing places for a day because he thinks her work is easier. He, of course, learns his lesson.' Since the basic unit of economic production and consumption was the peasant household, a woman's contribution was made within the context of her family. Because medieval English peasant families were not normally extended with many female kin to lend a hand, a household relied heavily on the wife's contribution to the home economy. But what was the nature of her contribution? The tyrannical husband of the ballad argues: "And sene the good that we have is halfe dele thyn,/Thow shalt laber for thy part as I doo for myne."2 Two areas are traditionally assigned to the wife: the daily running of the household and raising and training the next generation. But women performed a variety of other tasks, including the classical occupation of spinning, that supplemented the routine management of house and family by bringing in extra earnings.
The problem for historians has been to find evidence on how married couples divided the economic responsibilities of the household. Men's contributions emerge more quickly because they frequently appeared in the manorial court rolls in cases related to their work and landholding or in the account rolls where their wages were recorded. Women's work was more often directed toward the private household economy than the public one of the manor. One might take the excellent studies that have been done of early modern and modern peasant women and project their picture back into earlier centuries, but the early modern economy was different in many ways from the medieval one. Women in early modern Europe had many more opportunities to work in cottage industry or to sell their labor in the rapidly expanding cities.3 The economy of the thirteenth through late fifteenth centuries in England was still largely centered around the exploitation of individual holdings on manors. Manorial records do contribute something to our knowledge of women's work, and information can be gleaned from wills, poll tax returns, and coroners' inquests.
Most rural women would eventually marry, because they could find few positions outside the household economy. Peasant women would not become nuns and the position of servant was usually a temporary one within the teenage years of the life cycle. The other options for unmarried peasant girls were not entirely attractive. They could stay at their brother's home and work for his family; they could hope to find work in an urban center or on a manor as a servant; or they could become prostitutes. J. C. Russell's work on the 1377 poll tax showed that, in villages with populations up to eight hundred, 75 percent of the women were married. This percentage tended to decrease in boroughs. The figure represents all women over fourteen years of age (the taxable age) but does not indicate widows or those who would eventually marry.' As we have seen, determining the number of men and women who remained single is difficult but has been estimated to be 7 percent of the population in the mid-sixteenth century. Thus the number of permanently celibate women was very low.5
A woman's first contribution to the household economy, therefore, was the money, goods, animals, or land that she brought to the marriage in her dowry, dower from a former husband, or inheritance in her own right. These possessions came from a variety of sources, but wills give the most detailed information. One must remember, however, that they are a biased source since they tend to overrepresent the wealthier elements in the community. Since men left the vast majority of wills, women appear as beneficiaries of husbands, fathers, grandfathers, godfathers, and masters.
A father dying without a son to inherit could will his property to his daughters. In the customary law of the manor and in common law, as we noted in the section on inheritance, the property would be divided equally among the surviving daughters. A will gave a man of property an opportunity to divide the inheritance himself, so that he could favor one daughter, usually the eldest, and keep the family lands intact. Of the 319 married men leaving wills in Bedfordshire in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, 44 of them, or 14 percent, had only daughters as heirs.6 Sometimes the daughter was already married and the will makes clear that the son-in-law would have control over the land, but the right to the land remained to the issue of the marriage. Since heiresses were much sought after in marriage, the father would have carefully selected the son-in-law. After all, the father might retire and live with them. Other fathers died young and left the lands in care of their widows until the daughters were of marriageable age.
Even if the daughter was not the chief heir, she could claim some part of the family wealth, usually payable in animals, grain, household goods or money. These inheritances might have been in addition to an earlier dowry or they might be a provision for it. Only 9 percent of the wills specifically mention that the bequest to a woman was for her marriage. Henry Davy, a prosperous man, died with two daughters still unmarried. He left them both considerable grants of land that they were to receive on their marriage.' Monetary bequests for dowries ranged from 13s. 4d. to C40. John Derlynge, who left his daughter 20s., was fairly typical of the humbler will makers.' Other relatives might also contribute toward a girl's marriage. An uncle on the father's side was the usual source, but one grandfather generously gave each of his granddaughters ;E10 toward her marriage. In the poem "How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter," the mother meets her obligations to her daughter's dowry by collecting household goods for her as soon as she is born.9
Dying men also raised the issue of their wives' remarriage and made provision for them accordingly. Of the 319 married men leaving wills, 74 percent were survived by a widow. Common law allowed a widow a third of the husband's property for life and would permit her to take this land into a new marriage.10 Wills, however, gave husbands greater flexibility, and most chose the more generous provisions of customary law that gave the wife life interest in the tenement or control until the son reached the age of majority. Some other dower would be settled on her when she relinquished the land to their heir. The husband might also stipulate that the dower was hers only if she did not remarry. Other husbands left their widows clear title to some property that they could take with them if they married, but not the family land. Thus John Heywood provided his widow with C20, a number of animals, grain, and the household goods she had brought with her as dowry. These were to be given her "wit owt eny grugge ... of my children.""
The women of whom we have been speaking received sufficient property from fathers, husbands, or other kin to make them sought-after marriage partners. Society did not dictate a specific value for the dowry in order to marry; that was a matter of individual negotiations. But if family could not provide, how could a single woman hope to accumulate a dowry or supplement a meager one?
Servants received bequests from dying masters or mistresses in addition to wages. The typical bequests included items of clothing, sheep, a small sum of money, or malt." Occasionally, a favored servant would inherit a substantial bequest; Elizabeth Lamkyn was given 26s. 8d. "to her profeccion."13 Since servants were often the social equals of the masters, some of these gifts may have been part of a social network of village mutual support. Thus servants were rather like godchildren and received similar types of gifts in wills.
Female servants also converted wages into bits of land of an acre or two that they could add to their dowry, as indicated by the entrance fines they paid in manorial court.14 In the tight land market of preplague England even a woman with only an acre of land would be an attractive marriage partner. The living that such a small dowry could provide was not much and would probably be matched by a groom with equally meager resources, but five acres could supp
ort a couple in good years. Undoubtedly some young people even married without a cushion of land or savings, and had to rely on their labor for survival." When fathers or brothers did not provide dowries, the young women tended to choose their own husbands, as we shall see later. They had no need of parental consent, as they were not part of the family's economic strategy.'6
The dowry having been contributed to the new household, the bride settled into her other roles of providing her labor, reproductive capacity, and childrearing to the economy. The literature and folklore of the Middle Ages are decisive in dividing the men's sphere from the women's both in physical environment and types of work. John Ball's revolutionary jingle on class consciousness is well known: "When Adam delved and Eve span/Where then were all the gentlemen." It is instructive that Ball found nothing wrong with the sexual division of labor, only that in the beginning there were not class distinctions. Men and women were also distinguished by the symbols of their particular spheres of work, and these are common identifying characteristics in art and literature. The poem "The False Fox" provides a classic example:
The accidental-death patterns in the coroners' inquests and manorial court evidence confirm the sex-specific division of labor in rural England.
Women's work and their general round of daily activities was much less physically dangerous than men's; women comprised only 22 percent of the 2022 adults (over the age of fourteen) in the accidental-death cases in the coroners' inquests. Compared to the men, women's accidents indicate that they spent much more of their workday around the house and village: 29.5 percent of the women victims compared to 11.8 percent of the men died of accidents in their houses or closes. (See Appendix, Table 1.) Apparently they spent more time than men visiting and working with their neighbors: 5.8 percent of the women's fatal accidents were in a neighbor's home or close compared to 3.8 percent of the men. When women did venture from home, it was often in connection with their domestic duties. Thus 5.9 percent of the women victims drowned in a public well compared to 1.6 percent of the men, and 9.7 percent of the women died in a village ditch or pond compared to 4.9 percent of the men. Men were much more likely than women to die in fields, forests, mills, construction sites, and marl pits. The place of death, therefore, confirms women's chief sphere of work as the home and men's as the fields and forests.
The Ties That Bound Page 18