The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  The daily lives and conditions of peasantry varied from year to year and from district to district, just as did the ways in which lords made use of their land. In some cases the lord farmed his own land, advised by stewards and bailiffs and employing men for wages: by the early thirteenth century about half the men working on the land in England were receiving wages either for a full day’s work or part-time work. In other cases the lord let his land to tenants who paid him, if not with their services, in kind or in money; in yet others he let it to one single tenant, a farmer, who for an agreed sum would buy his rights and the services due to him. These services were far from uniform. In Northumbria, for example, husbandmen were mostly shepherds and were rarely required to work on the lord’s land; and in the east of England there were more men who had acquired their freedom from service than there were in the Midlands.17

  This freedom was gained in a variety of ways. Some had paid for their manumission; others had been granted it by some such charter as that granted in 1355 to a serf of little use to him by the Bishop of Exeter:

  Whereas thou, being now come to thy fifty years, hast no longer any wife or offspring lawfully begotten of thy body, and art so insufficient in wordly goods that thou must needs live from thine own labour, and knowest no art but that of a boatman, therefore we cannot hold it unprofitable to us or to Our Church of Exeter to restore thee to thy natural liberty. Wherefore, in order that thou mayest be able to labour more freely and seek thy daily food and clothing by boatmanship, we do hereby manumit thee and restore to natural liberty both thyself and all goods and chattels whatsoever, specially reserving for Ourselves and Our successors and Our Church the patronage of thyself, and all thine offspring if perchance thou do beget any such.18

  In this case the boatman was set completely free, though ‘patronage’, probably meaning heriot, was reserved both for himself and his children. But often the serf was granted his manumission only on condition that he continued to supply some service. The Prior of Bath, for instance, agreed to free one of his serfs on the understanding that he would continue throughout his life to be on call when required as a plumber and glazier.

  Other serfs had gained their freedom by running away, usually to a town where – though the laws were vague, variable and contradictory – it seems that provided his lord had not succeeded in recapturing him within four days, a court order would be required to bring him back into servitude. If he succeeded in escaping to a chartered town and remained there for a year and a day, becoming a burgess or a member of a merchant guild, his lord was powerless to force him to go back to his manor, so long as he remained in the borough. If he did not stay in the borough, however, trouble might well be in store for him, as it was for Simon de Paris who although humbly born, had done so well for himself that he had become an alderman and sheriff of London. In 1306 he returned to his family home at Necton in Norfolk and was promptly arrested by the lord’s bailiff who ordered him to take up the appointment of reeve. Simon refused and was put in prison, the lord maintaining that the man had been a villein, that is to say a feudal serf, and was, therefore, always a villein. He had been caught in his ‘villein’s nest’ and was liable for villein’s service. The justice agreed with the lord when the case came to court, but the jury did not. The influence of the City of London was powerful and Simon was released.19

  Yet it was not always possible to escape from servitude even if the former villein remained in a town. Some town charters expressly excluded serfs from the privileges they granted. The charter of Plympton did so, for instance. Here the Earl of Devon decreed that ‘our born serfs, who if they happen to remain or sojourn in the aforesaid borough, cannot claim or usurp any liberty by reason of the aforesaid liberty granted to our aforesaid burgesses, without our consent’. Also, it was often extremely difficult and occasionally impossible for the serf to enter a guild. In many towns no one who was a serf could be enrolled as an apprentice or admitted to a guild, a serf being defined as the son of a man who was himself a serf at the time of the child’s birth. Yet if a man could survive as a porter, a roadmender or servant or in some other occupation for which guild membership was not necessary, his descendants might one day become burgesses and even rich citizens.

  A serf might also become free if his lord decided for some reason to enfranchize a village and convert it into a borough. The Earl of Derby did this in 1251 when he created the borough of Higham Ferrers; and the ninety-two men whose names are listed in the charter, ‘their families and tenements and chattels’, were suddenly freed from servitude. Moreover, in the case of royal boroughs, their residents might bring freedom to serfs in villages outside their walls when their towns were prosperous and needed to expand. In 1256, for example, the townsmen of Scarborough received from the king permission to absorb the manor of Wallesgrave ‘with all its appurtenances and 60 acres’ into their town. Thus all the serfs on the manor were made free overnight. In the same way when a new borough was created, land and burgage rights were offered to all those who would come and settle in it. Such rights were offered by Edward I in 1286 when royal deputies were ordered to ‘lay out, with sufficient streets and lanes, and adequate sites for a market and church, and plots for merchants and others, a new town with a harbour in a place called Gotowre-super-mare [Dorset]’.20

  By these various means more and more serfs gained their freedom as the years passed; and whereas in the middle of the fourteenth century over half the population of England were serfs, by the end of the sixteenth all men were free. Because a man was free, however, it did not necessarily follow that he was better off than a serf. Some serfs held far more land than free men, as much as fifty or sixty acres, and could well afford to pay not to fulfil the obligations to their lords which were demanded of them, or even to send servants in their place. A free man, on the other hand, might well be driven to work on the land of a man who was still technically a serf in order to survive. And in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries survival for many became increasingly difficult. At least fifteen acres were needed to support a family of five, yet it is probable that less than half the number of families had as much land as that. Many peasants accordingly found it more profitable to work regularly for a master; and as more and more men paid for exemption from labour services, so there were more lords who could afford to, or were obliged to, pay men to work for them full time. The lord’s workers not only had the benefit of a steady wage, in good seasons and in bad, something like 4d a day at the end of the thirteenth century, but they were also provided when necessary with living quarters in the manor’s outbuildings or in barns on a more distant farm which were no more uncomfortable than the cottages of the other villagers; and they commonly enjoyed better food than the cottagers could supply for themselves. On one Norfolk manor in 1272 the lord’s labourers were given beef as well as peas-pottage and bread, good beer and cheese, cod and herrings and even, on special occasions as a recompense for particularly heavy work, a goose.

  Nor were lords the only employers of labour. Tenants, widows in particular, would pay other tenants to work for them, ploughing, harrowing, manuring or carting, and they would either pay them money or allow them a share of the crop when harvested. Men in regular and comparatively well rewarded work were, nevertheless, rare. They became proportionately rarer as the population of the country grew; and, while the number of mouths to feed expanded, the soil declined in fertility, agricultural prices and rents rose steeply, as much as 50 per cent in the first half of the century, and wages fell against the high cost of living. Poor harvests became frequent, that of 1315 being calamitous; and, while famine spread, cattle perished from murrain. At the same time the profits to be made from wool were so enticing that it was no longer considered worth while to reclaim land for arable farming. Fines imposed in the manorial courts had to be waived because the offenders were quite unable to pay them. And then in the summer of 1348 help for the agricultural labourer came with the consequences of a fearful pestilence that spread across the
land.

  3 Plague and Revolt

  ‘In the year of our Lord 1348, about the feast of the Translation of St Thomas,’ wrote a monk of Malmesbury, ‘the cruel pestilence, terrible to all future ages, came from parts over the sea to the south coast of England, into a port called Melcombe in Dorsetshire.’1

  From Dorset the pestilence spread rapidly throughout the West Country, infecting Somerset and Devon, reaching Bristol on 15 August, then extending its ravages to Gloucester, sweeping east to Oxford then south to London.

  It passed most rapidly from place to place [recorded Robert of Avesbury, Registrar of the Court of Canterbury], swiftly killing ere mid-day many who in the morning had been well, and without respect of persons (some few rich people excepted), not permitting those destined to die to live more than three, or at most four, days. On the same day twenty, forty, sixty and very often more corpses were committed to the same grave.2

  At Bristol and in other towns, existing graveyards were soon overflowing with the dead and new graves had to be dug elsewhere.

  The victim’s symptoms were first the eruption of hard, dry swellings in various parts of the body, particularly in the groin, on the legs, neck and under the arms, then of small black pustules, known as tokens. These were followed by delirium and the vomiting of blood. It was so infectious, said John Clynn of the Order of Friars Minor, that those who so much as touched the bodies of victims, were immediately infected themselves and buried with them. In some cases the whole process of infection and death occupied but a single day.3

  No one knew whence the plague or Great Mortality, much later to be known as the Black Death, originated and even recently it was supposed that it was caused by exhalations from the earth which corrupted the air. Now it is known that bubonic plague is a disease not of man but of that species of black rat known as Rattus rattus which then scurried in their thousands through the streets and into houses, nesting in walls and rafters and darting out in search of food. The plague bacterium was transmitted from one rat to the next by fleas which, gorging on the animals’ blood, became so saturated with bacteria that they could no longer digest them and jumped to the skin of human beings to feed there instead. The disease – which may not have been bubonic plague but anthrax4 – seems to have originated in the East whence it was brought to the shores of the Black Sea by a Tartar horde which infected Genoese traders who in turn brought it to Europe.5

  The spread of the plague was halted by the onset of the cold winter months, but it renewed its course more virulently than ever with the advent of spring, causing further deaths in Oxford and London, reaching Kent and the eastern counties, infecting East Anglia by March and Yorkshire by May. Only the remote areas of the north-west, the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland and west Cornwall remained immune.

  Kent suffered as badly as anywhere. According to William Dene, a contemporary monk of Rochester:

  The Bishop of Rochester, but of his small household, lost four priests, five gentlemen, ten serving men, seven young clerks, and six pages so that not a soul remained who might serve him in any office … The mortality swept away so vast a multitude of both sexes that none could be found to carry the corpses to the grave. Men and women bore their own offspring on their shoulders to the church and cast them into a common pit. From these there proceeded so great a stench that hardly anyone dared to cross the cemeteries … In this pestilence many chaplains and paid clerics refused to serve, except at excessive salaries … and priests betook themselves to places where they could get larger stipends than in their own benefices … So great also was the deficiency of labourers and workmen of every kind in those days that more than a third of the land over the whole kingdom remained uncultivated.6

  The worst affected places were the large towns where the often filthy and normally congested conditions in which people lived and rats thrived were more common than in the countryside. Small villages did not escape, however, once the contagion had caught hold. Some were entirely wiped out. It was said that the old and infirm were less susceptible than the young and healthy, but the pestilence struck all classes. The Archbishop of Canterbury died; so did all the Wardens of the Goldsmiths’ and Hatters’ Companies. Some religious houses lost all their inmates, Luffield and St Mary Magdalen at Sandon among them. But others were scarcely affected at all. At Christ-church, Canterbury, only four of the eighty monks lost their lives. Indeed, the pattern of mortality throughout the country varied considerably, as have modern estimates as to the number of lives lost. Professor Shrewsbury suggested that the death toll cannot have been more than a twentieth of the population; other estimates make it a third or even a half.7 What the population of the country was in 1348 is unknown. It is likely, however, that there were about 1.25 million people when Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, that there were about 3.5 million in the middle of the thirteenth century, that by 1300 this figure had risen to some 4.25 million, but that by 1380 the population was less than 2.5 million, some areas, particularly in the north, being very thinly inhabited, others, in such good arable areas as East Anglia and Leicestershire, being more densely populated. There were reasons other than the Black Death for the sharp fall, among them occasional famine and the decline in corn growing which required a large labour force and the expansion of sheep farming which did not. Yet there can be no doubt that the mortality in 1348–9 was extremely high, and that, followed by less virulent epidemics, it accelerated a change which was already occurring in English society.8

  As the thirteenth century progressed, the system of commuting service on the lord’s farmland for money had begun to be less common and, on some manors, to be reversed. The growth in population had increased the demand for land and had enabled the lord to ask for both higher rents and more frequent services. But now there was plenty of land for the surviving peasants and an acute labour shortage. Indeed, in the years immediately following the Black Death there were plentiful supplies of corn, cattle and sheep which had not been affected by the pestilence: seven years after the Black Death some 40,000 sacks of wool were being exported annually. And many peasants were able to increase their holdings by taking over the strips of those who had perished. Others, who had no land, were able to demand greater rewards for their services – as much as two and a half times as much as they had earned before the pestilence – and if they did not receive these increases, they fled to another manor or to a town where labour was short and sure to be well rewarded.

  Many landlords thus deprived of labour chose to let their land either for a money rent or for payment in kind; and their tenants – some growing crops, others becoming sheep farmers, yet others doing both – developed into quite well-to-do yeoman farmers whose interests were more closely identified with the lesser gentry than with the landless labourers whose discontents they no longer shared. Parliament supported the yeoman farmers in their disagreements with the landless labourer. So did the lords of the manor, both lay and ecclesiastical, who feared that the labourers’ demand for higher wages might make their rents from the farmers difficult to collect. And so did the law officers of the Crown whom many peasants saw as the greatest predators of all. This combined resentment towards the labourers resulted in 1351 in a Statute of Labourers which vainly endeavoured to keep wages down, to ensure, for instance, that no one was to be paid for haymaking more than the 1d a day he might have expected to earn before the Black Death, and that charity should not be given to able-bodied beggars. A subsequent statute proposed that any labourer who left his place of work to seek higher wages should be branded with the letter F on his forehead as a sign of falsehood. It became a crime for a labourer to wear clothes suited only to a higher station in life, for a servant to pay more for his cloth than a prescribed amount, for ‘common lewd women’ to dress like ‘good noble dames’ and so make it difficult to discover ‘what rank they are’.

  As the difference between the labourers and those more fortunate widened, so there developed an increasing concern for social status. The term gen
tleman began to be generally used as well as yeoman and husbandman. Also, in the higher ranks of society, the range of hereditary titles was extended; and those below them in the social hierarchy were expected to show due respect to their betters, to their ‘very dear, honourable and rightful lord’. As The Mirror of Magistrates put it,

  No subject ought for any kind of course

  To force the lord, but yield him to the laws.9

  Subjects were, however, no longer content to submit themselves to this subordination and were becoming ever more unruly. They declared themselves ‘to be quit and utterly discharged of all manner of serfage, due as well of their body as of their tenures,’ according to the preamble to a statute of 1377, ‘and they will not suffer any distress or other justice to be made upon them. They do menace the ministers of their lords of life and member, and, which more is, gather themselves in great routs and agree by such confederacy that every one shall aid the other to resist their lords with strong hand.’10

  These unruly villeins had many allies. There were burghers in the towns who, dissatisfied with their own landlords, sympathised with them. So did many friars and priests; one of these was John Ball, who had on three occasions been committed to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prison for his utterances and, despite a subsequent sentence of excommunication, had moved about the country from churchyard to market-place, demanding the abolition of all bishops and abbots and preaching upon the text:

  When Adam dalf [dug] and Eve span,

  Who was thanne a gentilman?

  Ball warmly supported many of the doctrines of John Wyclif, especially Wyclif’s claim that men had the right to withhold tithes from unworthy clergymen, his condemnation of monasticism, the secular riches of the church and the celibacy of the clergy. And, although Wyclif had as many if not more supporters in Parliament as among the common people (who were not particularly anxious to have the Bible translated into English), there were several Lollards, as Wyclif’s followers were called, on the rebels’ side. Also on their side was a motley collection of outlaws and vagabonds, discharged soldiers and bowmen, poachers and other fugitive offenders against the laws of the forest.