In the high summer of 1264, on the days leading up to the full moon on 9 August, pilgrims and merchants coming up from Dover towards Canterbury saw an astonishing sight. Spread over the countryside on the London road under the sails of the ‘Black Mill’ at Barham Down, just a few miles from the cliffs of Dover, was a vast encampment. There were knights from all over England, with their colourful tabards and flashing escutcheons, their banners streaming, squires exercising their warhorses, armourers busy at their forges. But the mass of those present were peasants, a people’s army of England numbering tens of thousands of men. Around the campfires were men of Essex led by their constables, freemen of Norfolk and the Marches under their sheriffs, Leicestershire peasants with their lords, the Bassets, and even a contingent from little Rutland. Looking down towards the sparkling summer horizon over Deal and Walmer, the sea breezes stirring banners and signal flags, the smoke of cooking fires swirling over Barham Hill, it was such an incredible sight that those who were there then were lost for words: ‘There was then such a multitude gathered together against the foreigners that you simply would not have believed that so many men armed for war could have existed in the whole of England.’
And there in the crowd, under Saer de Harcourt’s standard with its horizontal stripes of red and gold, is John Wodard, freeman of Kibworth. Narrowing his eyes he looks down to the sea (if we may imagine him so) with his horse, spear, helmet and knapsack; on his head below his cap a fresh scar from a recent blow. John came from a peasant family long rooted in Kibworth and Smeeton: his name in Old English means ‘wood ward’, the keeper of the lord’s wood; perhaps it had once been the Wodards’ hereditary job to handle infringements of the forest law. The Wodards were a big kin group with several households, one of the most prominent and influential in the village along with the Polles, Swans and Heyneses, some of whom perhaps are with him now among the freemen from Kibworth and Smeeton with their mounts and war gear. They had been summoned here by Simon de Montfort’s baronial government, who had overthrown King Henry III and were now ruling in his name. To repel a threatened invasion of ‘aliens’ from France, Montfort had called for a huge army of peasants from every village, to come with horse, spear and helmet. Around Wodard then were perhaps a dozen of his neighbours from Kibworth and Smeeton, others from Newton Harcourt, Carlton and other places in the hundred of Gartree. All were here for the cause of England.
The atmosphere in those early days was exultant. For the first time peasants from all over England had the opportunity – paid for forty days by their fellow villagers – to meet and talk about the tremendous events which had rocked the nation over the last few years culminating in the defeat of King Henry that May. The deeds of Simon and the barons were already the subject of popular song and poems; and the mood we may imagine was like that during the days of the Armada, or when Napoleon’s Grande Armée waited in its barges at Boulogne; or even 1940, with Simon playing the role of Churchill, urging his soldiers that they must ‘fight on the beaches and never surrender’. Simon himself was Earl of Leicester (and lord of Smeeton) and his supporters there had come down in force: the Bassets and the Burdetts, the lords of Sapcote, Branston, Huncote, little Galby and Frisby, and Saer de Harcourt, the lord of Kibworth Harcourt. That was perhaps what had led John Wodard here among the freemen from Kibworth when after Lammas he would normally have been about to start harvesting the winter-sown corn on his strips in the open fields.
Behind the peasant involvement in these events lay what might anachronistically be called a working-class view of history. What was in the mind of Wodard and the other Kibworth men in the great army of Kent we can only conjecture from hints in the sources and from popular songs and poetry. But John and his neighbours we must presume shared a vision of ‘the gode olde lawes’ which had once pertained in England before the Conquest. A common view among the freeborn English too was that the English people had been ‘in thrall’ since the days of William the Conqueror. As John would have put it, ‘sithen he and his have had the lond in heritage that the Inglis haf so laid … that thei lyve in servage. He sette the Inglis to be thralle, that or (once) was so free.’
In the folk memory of the later thirteenth century King John in particular had been a monster of venality and partiality (that image goes back far beyond Walter Scott or modern Hollywood epics). Back in their grandfathers’ day Magna Carta had largely been concerned with upper-class rights and privileges, but it was nevertheless understood as a stand against autocratic royal rule. But it was felt that the kings since had repeatedly abandoned the charter and that constant struggle and vigilance would be needed to maintain English freedoms. English people too knew that the great charter had been only grudgingly given and confirmed, and that John’s successors only half-heartedly observed it: ‘feebly kept it was after his day, of King John and the others …’ who ‘granted and confirmed it unwillingly, thinking it to be worth nothing’.
Such ideas lay behind the great cause, the ‘community of the realm’, which in the thirteenth century swept up even the peasantry of Kibworth and their neighbours. The nub was the law, and the freeborn English peasant’s right to use it in court to defend his rights. ‘Every king is ruled by the laws that he enacts,’ wrote an Angevin lawyer. ‘We give first place to the community and we say too that the law takes precedence over the king’s dignity.’ The rulers were well aware of the feelings of the shire about the common law. In 1219 the justices of the king declared to the king’s council that ‘we who ought to be judges would become contemptible in the sight of those to whom we have been sent to enact justice … we assert most firmly that we have done nothing contrary to the approved custom of the land.’ Jurists also acknowledged that ‘the custom of the nation is better known to the people of the nation than any foreigner’ (England’s rulers of course were French-speaking). Asked about the way the system worked, one thirteenth-century legal expert answered: ‘Ask the country people, they know best!’ South-east Leicestershire’s freemen had become a radicalized hotbed in the decades since Magna Carta. The freemen of places like Kibworth and Peatling Magna, even the villeins of Stoughton, used the courts to defend their status, and when we hear them speak they are not discussing the price of corn but the ‘welfare of the community of the realm’ on which they believed they could speak in the king’s court to the king’s justices.
So by the thirteenth century both lawgivers and peasants believed that the law should work for them. During the course of the half-century from Magna Carta to the Barons’ Revolt, they found their voice. And that is what had brought John Wodard and his neighbours to Barham Down that summer in 1264 on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’.
Magna Carta
Time heals wounds. Richard FitzNeal, whom we have already met in this story as a member of the government of Henry II in the 1180s writing about Domesday and its aftermath, recounts a casual conversation he had ‘in the twenty-third year of the reign of King Henry II, while I was sitting at the window of a tower next to the River Thames’, and in doing so lets slip a rare insight into how social change was perceived in England. As he saw it, change in some respects was for the better. Violence, racial hatred and secret killings were on the wane; the reach of justice had improved in most places though the killing of serfs still went unpunished. But ‘in most places’ the powers that be couldn’t get away with killing a villein with impunity, that is, without the murdered man’s family having recourse to the law. It is a startling admission of how bad things had been.
FitzNeal was a sophisticated observer and his book is a mine of sharp realistic observations. As he admits, his remarks were not true everywhere, but from the documentary evidence he was broadly right that by 1200 the rapid growth of peasant literacy and access to local courts meant that the issue of rights was perceived as central by both high and low. In the Magna Carta in 1215 King John had acceded to the barons’ demands made in response to his wholesale abuses of power. In essence it was a charter for the ruling class but it embodied the crucial principle that the king was bound by the law, that kingship indeed is the creation of the law. Immediately after John’s death Magna Carta was reissued in the name of his successor, and there were several versions up to 1225. Since then it has come to be regarded by English people, and by all who have adopted English law, as the chief constitutional defence against arbitrary or unjust rule. Its most famous clauses express some of the English people’s most deeply held political beliefs, and pertained to both rich and poor:
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals, or by the law of the land … To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
Later lawyers found here the basis for some fundamental English rights: equality before the law and freedom from arbitrary arrest. To the king, of course, 1215 was a treaty of peace forced on him under duress by barons who had rebelled against the royal authority. But the wheels of change were in motion, and no longer only in the hands of the upper class. The story reached its climax in the Barons’ Revolt of 1264–5, under Simon de Montfort, the French-born Earl of Leicester who was married to the king’s sister. Simon was a French-speaking aristocrat who despised the ordinary English peasant, but he became a figure of adulation, a hero around whom popular tales, songs and even miracle stories gathered. He was a secular martyr who like Thomas Becket had stood against royal power.
Simon and the barons were determined to maintain the limitations on royal power granted by Magna Carta and to force the king to rule within a framework of custom and common law. Their movement was particularly attentive to the opinions of the shire and of the hundreds, the fundamental units of local rule. In 1258 in the Provisions of Oxford the barons had attempted to reduce Henry III to the status of a constitutional monarch. It has been said that ‘no other kingdom in Europe had gone so far towards a republican Constitution.’ The name of the movement is most revealing: the barons (who were French-speaking) called themselves the ‘community of the realm’, le commun de Engleterre, translated in the vigorous English version of the Provisions as ‘this landes folc’. Claiming to represent the interests of the country as a whole, the barons demanded that elected councillors were to hold a parliament three times a year ‘to review the state of the realm and to deal with the common business of the realm and of the king together’. It was bound to end in war. And now not only the barons but the peasants too believed they had a stake in the outcome.
The people’s voice: ‘England is free’
Medieval chroniclers were of course interested in personalities, kings and nobles. They themselves tended to be clerics from the upper or middle classes, and the thought of the masses taking political action caused them a shudder of horror. It was of no concern to them whether peasants died, or who they were. But in the revolution of the 1260s the free peasantry of south Leicestershire, Simon’s earldom, were widely politicized; they were involved in these events and unnamed freemen must have given their lives for the cause. Some no doubt followed their feudal lord as they were told to do; many though were elected by fellow villagers and supplied with money for subsistence. And some, like Wodard, must have been well-acquainted with events and supported Montfort because they understood the issues having heard them discussed in the manor and at the hundred courts at the Gartree. In the collective memory over the last century or two the rapacious rule of foreigners had left its mark. Now the peasants wanted more say.
In May 1264, though outnumbered heavily in mounted knights, Simon defeated the royal army at Lewes in Sussex. In a brief burst of extreme violence on the downs above the town 3,000 royalists were killed; 1,500 knights and squires were heaped into death pits stripped of their expensive gear, having been slaughtered by exultant peasants. For a moment England stood on the verge of ‘Europe’s first constitutional revolution’ and in the euphoria after Lewes popular songs trumpeted the idea that ‘England is now free’ and that freeborn Englishmen were ‘no longer treated like dogs in their own land’. Big ideas with startling suddenness could now be spoken out loud. ‘Every king is ruled by the laws which he enacts. We give first place to the community, we also say that the law rules, and takes precedence over the king’s dignity.’
In the aftermath of the battle the king and his son, Prince Edward, were captured and England entered the strange phoney war of Montfort’s regency. A brief explosion of anti-royalist violence across the home counties was followed by an uneasy peace as Montfort and his allies attempted to rule through the king. It is in this period that the involvement of John Wodard and the peasants of Kibworth and neighbouring villages began, in that uncertain time when no one knew where the revolution would lead.
The crime of John Wodard
Back home in Kibworth, four weeks after Lewes, it was the old custom to go on pilgrimage at Pentecost to their mother church of St Mary Arden next to Market Harborough, an ancient Anglo-Saxon minster from where every year their vicar collected the chrism oil. We may imagine the Kibworth people walking from their village in the open air along village tracks in lovely June weather through ripening cornfields. The vicar, Oliver of Sutton, and his chaplains were carrying religious banners, followed by the pilgrims with their emblems and badges. The most important pilgrimages in the village were also Marian, to Walsingham and Lincoln, and pewter pilgrim badges from both shrines have turned up in the village recently, on one of which the Virgin’s lilies can still be seen. This Pentecost’s journey took them five miles to the River Welland at Harborough, the new trading town founded some eighty years before and already a thriving market with traders, merchants and craftsmen. Today the church of St Mary Arden is a small roofless chapel hidden behind trees on a rounded hill just above the railway station; ignored by almost all visitors to that charming town of coaching inns with its Stuart schoolroom and its magnificent church of St Dionysus. Once much bigger, the church was largely demolished in the seventeenth century, and only the Norman porch survives from that day in 1264.
Below the church the graveyard stretched down the hillside to the Welland, where there was an ancient sacred well known as Lady Well. The pilgrimage probably required prayers at the shrine before its image of Mary, and then bathing and drinking at the sacred well, especially for the sick and infirm, who were borne along by the villagers. The mood we may conjecture was celebratory. Kibworth was a Montfortian village and we might imagine a little touch of victorious football fans arriving in hostile territory with the Montfortian villagers arriving on the royal estate of Great Bowden and insisting on the performance of their ancient customary celebration. But the Bowden people blocked their way, some of them apparently armed. Things grew tense. There was a stand-off at the church door and hotheads began to jostle. What followed was over in a moment, but by one of those miracles of medieval record-taking, the account survives in the National Archives:
When the men of Kybbeworth came to the church of Harborough to make their procession there on Monday in the week of Pentecost in year 48 [9 June 1264], according to what is the custom of the country [patria], the foresaid William Kyng came and wished to prevent them from proceeding into the foresaid church, and struck the foresaid Wodard, who came with the foresaid men of Kybbeworth, in the head with an axe, and pursued him, wishing to strike him again and kill him if he could, and the foresaid Wodard, perceiving this, turned round and struck the foresaid William in the head with an axe so that he afterwards died of that blow.
Wodard was accused of murder. By an added piece of good fortune the inquiry by the judge, Gilbert of Preston, into the circumstances in which Wodard killed William King also survives, on a roll recording numerous assizes and inquiries heard by Preston that year. From it we learn that the inquiry was commissioned by the king on 6 October 1264 at Canterbury, which, given the date, means it was commissioned by the Montfortian government when Simon and the king were in Kent directing the English army against the great ‘alien’ invasion. Very likely it was Saer who obtained the commission on behalf of his man John, appealing for a pardon at the time when the Kibworth troops were outside the city in the great camp on Barham Down. Wodard presumably then was down there in the ranks of Simon’s peasant army, loyal to his lord, and perhaps even to his cause.
Preston heard the inquiry the next spring at Rockingham Castle near Market Harborough (the castle is visible from the terrace above the allotments at Westerby) on 11 April 1265. The jurors were all local men who had ridden over from Kibworth and neighbouring villages: William of Gumley, Walter the clerk of Langton and Richard of Saddington (who was married to a Kibworth woman), along with four villagers: Hugh of Kibworth, Richard Fisseburn, Nicholas ‘at the Thorn’ and John Faukin. With no Bowden men the jury was perhaps loaded in John’s favour. They simply had to decide ‘whether Wodard of Kybbeworth killed William Kyng of Bowden in self-defence so that otherwise he could not have escaped his own death, or through felony or premeditated malice’.
Weighing up the witnesses, they concluded on oath that King had been the aggressor, had stopped them going into the church and struck Wodard with an axe and had intended to kill him. ‘So they say certainly that the foresaid Wodard killed the foresaid William in self-defence and not through felony or premeditated malice.’
With Saer’s encouragement, had the fateful Pentecost procession turned into a celebration of the Montfortian victory? This might well have aroused fury at Harborough, which was a royal manor – even William King’s name suggests a king’s man. Certainly axes at the church door seem hardly the way to welcome pilgrims at Pentecost. King and the locals had evidently come prepared. According to the royal patent rolls Wodard’s pardon was finally given at Northampton, on 22 April 1265. The letter patent was issued at the instance of the Lord of Kibworth, Saer de Harcourt, who is specifically called ‘a knight of Simon de Montfort, the steward of England’. Thus in the letter which Wodard himself would have taken away and doubtless shown to his fellow villagers, the Kibworth peasant was associated both with Saer, his lord, and with Saer’s lord, the Earl of Leicester and guardian of England, the great Montfort himself.
Alien invasion: ‘We will fight on beaches’
Following his capture after the battle at Lewes on 14 May 1264, King Henry was now in the hands of the council of barons under Simon de Montfort. With Prince Edward also under arrest, the royalists grouped for a counter-attack around Henry’s French-born queen, Eleanor, and her supporters across the Channel. Eleanor had a deep war chest, and now approached King Louis of France for assistance, gathering allies and mercenaries to form an invasion army. The royalist fleet began to assemble in Boulogne, while back home the barons unleashed a tide of nationalist propaganda picturing the queen’s forces as ‘a vast horde of aliens thirsting for English blood’ who would spare no one if their army got a foothold in Kent. These were the circumstances in which the barons summoned the gigantic army that assembled on Barham Down that August: ‘All men capable of bearing arms … wherever they live in England, are to join us,’ the royal decree runs, ‘to protect the country night and day and not to go home without specific orders from us.’ Putting words into the captive king’s mouth, the royal letters emphasized that ‘Peace between ourselves and our barons to the honour of our Lord and for the good of ourselves and of our kingdom is now firmly established thanks be to God.’ Simon wrote to the king of France on Henry’s behalf: ‘We are day by day working on rectifying the problems which have arisen since the time of discord.’ At the same time Simon was firing off patriotic letters to the sheriffs in the shires claiming to speak now for all England. The Barons’ Proclamation of 7 July said:
We know for a fact that a vast horde of aliens is preparing to invade the land – so let no one plead as an excuse that the harvest is at hand or that some personal cause or private duty calls him. Much better to suffer a little personal loss and be safe than be delivered to a cruel death, with the loss of all your lands and goods at the impious hands of foreigners who are thirsting for your blood.
In late July the transports for the alien army were reported to be assembling at Boulogne, as Hitler and Napoleon were to do later; and beacons were readied along the south coast. The threat of invasion was on everyone’s lips, and rumours of a fifth column spread like wildfire, engendering a nasty tide of jingoism against resident aliens. Simon’s letters to King Louis of France meanwhile were searching for a diplomatic solution, pointing out that a ‘horrendous loss of life in both kingdoms will occur if the invasion takes place’. Meanwhile to meet the ‘alien army’ the feudal host, summoned in the king’s name through the local sheriffs, began to gather. Every magnate and every knight was expected to answer the king’s summons. But Montfort also called up a national levy drawn from the freemen of the shires. ‘By land and sea … capable and trustworthy men are to gather for the defence of the realm.’ Watchers were set on the coasts from the Wash to the Solent; in Lincolnshire for example 700 freemen of the shire were put on coast guard with only the poor exempted. The men of London and Greenwich were deployed to defend the estuaries of the Thames and the Medway. The archers of the Kentish Weald camped on the shingle between Romney and Winchelsea – ready literally to ‘fight on the beaches’. A circular letter to the shires shows that Midland shires were required to send knights and free tenants, but also ‘at the common charge’ eight, six or four men from each manor depending on its size. Each man was to be provided by his village with money to cover forty days’ supplies.
The atmosphere was at first electric. There may even have been football-style chants though these only survive in French:
Coment hom le nome? WHAT’S HIS NAME!!
He’s called MON-FORT!!
He’s in the monde and he’s big and strong
He loves what’s right and he hates what’s wrong
And he’ll always come out on top!!!
Flushed with their first successes the rebels’ mood grew ever more anti-alien; they sneered at the king’s despised brother Richard (‘Thah thou be ever trichard’: a deceiver, trickster) and threw metaphorical rotten vegetables at the queen (as indeed Londoners had done for real before the war broke out). But Simon for them was ‘brave and true’. Strange for a French-speaking aristocrat not known for his sympathies for the peasantry but now punning on his name, he was ‘in the world’ – their world – and the commoners were right with him.
The standoff in Kent, however, went on longer than the planned forty days and the army began to suffer as the weeks passed, supplies and money ran out, and the weather began to turn. The call-out had coincided with harvest time and the fieldwork for the autumn. By the end of August there were mounting desertions. One case recorded in detail involves John of Kibworth, a constable and trusted man of Saer. John acted as a messenger for Simon’s council in Canterbury. On 29 August Simon wrote ‘on the matter of raising funds for expenses for units on the sea coast’ to the Sheriff of Rutland: ‘We order you without delay to raise further allowances for the aforesaid men until the octave of the coming feast of the Virgin Mary.’ Formerly set at 3d a day, the allowance was now put up to 4d. John of Kibworth carried these messages on horseback between the king and the Rutland sheriff. But by 6 September the constables of the Rutland contingent were reporting that ‘the men were in want and had exceeded their term and had no lands or tenements from which they could support themselves.’ As the muster wore on into the autumn (and one imagines by then sanitary conditions in the camp had become intolerable) the Sheriff of Rutland was eventually forced to ask his villagers to find a hefty 8d a day for each of their men. Only in late October, when the invaders disbanded across the Channel, were the forces finally sent home, just in time to join their neighbours in ploughing last year’s fallow field ready for next year’s winter corn.
The alien threat had been averted. But the great issue for Simon and the barons once they had power was what to do with it. They had the king in their grasp but they still believed in the office of kingship; they simply wanted to limit its power. Finally the barons began to fall out among themselves with bitter arguments between erstwhile friends and allies. Then over in the west, Simon’s enemy Roger Mortimer gathered the Marcher lords against him. When Simon carelessly allowed Prince Edward to escape and to join Mortimer, he faced disaster. Events now began to move with all the momentum of a Shakespearean tragedy. Simon moved his army west to attack Mortimer, only to be intercepted by Edward, now joined by many magnates opposed to Simon’s overweening behaviour. At the start of August, finding the Severn crossing at Bridgenorth blocked, Simon forded the river and made a night march to Evesham hoping to rendezvous with the forces of his son. Arriving in the town soon after dawn his exhausted army found itself trapped by superior forces in a loop of the Avon. Realizing that he was surrounded, Simon is reported to have said: ‘God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are theirs.’
The battle was over quickly. It was as one contemporary remarked ‘the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none’. The recent discovery of a new eyewitness account conveys with horrible immediacy what Constable John of Kibworth and John Wodard experienced – if they were still in the army with their feudal lord (our sources of course were not interested in the names of the poor rank and file who died there). Simon marched out of the town and charged his enemy, but Edward and his generals had appointed a death squad to isolate him and almost immediately Simon was killed and hacked to pieces. There it might have ended but hatred and anger among royalists was so great that they mercilessly hunted their defeated enemies down. Two or three thousand Welsh foot soldiers were butchered trying to cross the Avon, ‘with the express approval of the king and his ministers’. In the blood-soaked aftermath even those taking refuge in the abbey down in the town were slaughtered as altar and shrines ran with blood. Below the hill many of the fugitives ran into a marshy stretch of water meadows along the Avon, where they were cut to pieces. Perhaps it was here that Wodard breathed his last breath, or perhaps he made his way back to the village. John himself disappears from Kibworth documents, though a generation later his kinsman Reginald is found in a typical village feud in the manor court fighting Nick Polle for trespass. In the village, life of course went on.
Retribution was inevitable. In the immediate aftermath of Evesham the estates of the Montfortians were pillaged in an irresistible wave, spreading out from the battlefield. And by an incredible chance, in the Court of Pleas records in the National Archives in Kew, what actually happened in the Kibworth area after the revolt is revealed in astonishing detail. Three days after Evesham, on Friday, 7 August, the news of Montfort’s defeat and death had already reached the heartland of his powerbase in Leicestershire. Royalists rapidly appeared in the shire with armed forces and the king’s marshal, Peter de Nevill and his standard bearer, Eudo de la Zouche. They moved to take control of the villages of south Leicestershire which had been sympathetic to Earl Simon, the estates of lords like Ralph Bassett (who had been killed in the battle) and Saer de Harcourt (who had been captured). Among them were Newton Harcourt and Kibworth Harcourt, and to the west of Kibworth a little place called Peatling Magna.
On Saturday, 8 August, one of Nevill’s grooms tried to go through Peatling Magna with a cart of supplies. The villagers objected and ‘some foolish men of the village’ then sought to arrest him with his cart and horses. In the scuffle the groom was wounded ‘in the arm above his hand’. On Wednesday the 12th Peter himself arrived with a large company of armed men to take revenge. Then the villagers confronted the marshal, and, according to Nevill, accused him and his men of sedition and ‘other heinous offences’ saying that they were ‘against the barons and against the welfare of the community of the realm’ (utilitas communitatis regni).
Not surprisingly the scene now turned nasty. Nevill threatened to burn the village down unless he got redress and the men took to the church for refuge. Now the women of the village took the lead, led by the wife of one of the peasants. Worried that their houses would be burned, they tried to negotiate a compromise, and according to Nevill promised that a sum of twenty marks should be paid to him as a fine on the following Sunday (a mark was 6s 8d – so twenty was a large sum for a small village).
With the help of the reeve and at the women’s prompting – but here the two sides would later strongly disagree over the course of events – five freemen agreed to stand as hostages for the payment of the fine, or perhaps were physically coerced by Nevill into doing so. They were poor freemen, and the rest of the community now clubbed together to provide the hostages with expenses. With that Nevill took the hostages away to prison and waited for the village to toe the line. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The community took their complaint about Nevill’s high-handed actions to the king’s justices of the peace. The upshot was that the peasants took the king’s marshal to court. Our surviving manuscript account is the record of this hearing and shows how English villagers now thought they could use the law. The case was brought against Nevill by the reeve and six others ‘on behalf of the community of the village’ claiming that he had used violence against them and that the five hostages had been taken illegally. Nevill denied force and wrongdoing. He had suffered trespass and violence at the hands of the ‘foolish’ villagers, who had accused him of heinous crimes ‘and beat and wounded and maltreated his men’. Speaking on behalf of the village community, Thomas the reeve and the local priest, who were alleged to have agreed the fine with Nevill, strongly denied that there had ever been any consent: as freemen they had been dragged out of church by force and wronged (in saying this were they perhaps aware of the clause in Magna Carta about arbitrary arrest?). They claimed compensation and the hostages too alleged they had ‘lain in prison in wretchedness … wherefore they say that as they are free men (liberi homines) and of free status, they have been wronged, and have suffered loss of livelihood to the value of a hundred marks.’ Thomas the reeve and the freemen of the village insisted that Peter had ‘dragged them by force and unwillingly out of the church and the churchyard’. In the end the king’s judges decided against them, but the case shines a fascinating light on the political views and class awareness of the peasants during this momentous national crisis. Here for the first time in English politics is the voice of the peasants of England.
The Hundred Rolls of 1279
The Barons’ Revolt had stirred up many questions about legal rights in the body politic. Royal rights had been usurped, ancient rights lost, mortgage documents stolen, debts cancelled by partisans. The peasants who had been down to Kent, who had fought in the armies, and whose villages had suffered at the hands of vengeful partisans knew well now how these things affected them and how some could be contested in law. In the aftermath of the war a flood of legal disputes began between peasants and their lords. Even villeins now went to court to contest their landlord’s view of their servile status. In 1275 at Stoughton three miles from Kibworth the landlord’s lawyers sneeringly dismissed such aspirations outside the courtroom when they cut short one rights case. They told the ‘foolish’ peasant litigants they would not be allowed to succeed in their plea, and that if they persevered they would waste a great deal of money; as the defence lawyers would be able to prove them villeins and therefore deny them the right to sue in a higher court. A satirical poem was then penned by a priest on the landlord’s side who uses his clever Latin learning to deride the leading peasant agitators and their wives: ‘What should a serf do except serve? And his son too? He shall be a serf pure and simple, deprived of freedom. The judgement of the Law, and of the King’s court, prove it so!’
From its own side, after such upheavals in politics with widespread confiscation and redistribution of estates, the government was anxious to re-establish clarity over land ownership and rights. Henry III had died in 1272 and was succeeded by his son, Prince Edward. At the time Edward was on crusade in the Holy Land and did not return to England till summer 1274, when he was crowned as King Edward I. Almost immediately Edward undertook a great survey of England, a second, but far more comprehensive Domesday, going into the most minute detail in every community and recording every member of the adult population for legal and tax purposes. Taken in 1274–5 and 1279–80, and known as the Hundred Rolls, these constitute the greatest body of evidence for the social history of England in this period, and the Hundred Rolls of 1279 are the most ambitious survey ever undertaken by an English ruler.
The questionnaire submitted to each of the local hundred juries had no fewer than forty-two questions on tenure, status, income, land holdings, stock and material holdings. Some of the original returns survive in the National Archives in Kew and some in county archives, though more than half are now lost. Had the survey been completed it would have amounted to a comprehensive register and customary of all England down to individual villeins, cottagers and serfs. For any place for which the returns have survived the rolls are a unique resource, some of which such as those from Kent are now available online.
The original returns for Leicestershire, as for most of the country, have not survived. But by a lucky chance the antiquarian William Burton, whom we met at the start of this story preparing his history of Leicestershire, made notes from the now-lost rolls in 1615. A copy of his notes in the Bodleian Library has not yet been fully published, though the antiquarian John Nichols in his first volume published Burton’s transcripts of a series of summaries of the 1279 surveys ‘made in every one of the individual vills and all the separate places throughout the county of Leicestershire’. But later in Burton’s manuscript a set of much fuller transcripts was missed by Nichols and remains unpublished. In them are our first accounts of Smeeton and the Kibworths since Domesday, and they mark another stage in the crystallization of our evidence for the village, as for the first time we are given the names of the families of the ordinary people themselves.
The form was that the local jurymen of Kibworth submitted their information to the jury for the whole of Gartree Hundred, presumably in a meeting in the open air at the Gartree. Armed with the returns for all the twenty-five villages in the hundred, the Gartree jury in their turn reported in person to the King’s three commissioners in Leicester. Their evidence was collated, checked and read back to them and they signalled agreement by fixing their seal to it. The names of the ‘twelve good men and true’ who represented Gartree Hundred are recorded by Burton, including well-to-do freeholders from Smeeton, Foxton and Houghton on the Hill; Thomas Basset, whose family had regained their position after their support for Montfort; and a Walter who may have been the reeve of Kibworth Harcourt. The hearings were held in the Great Hall of Leicester Castle, whose magnificent aisled hall still stands today, the largest and earliest in Europe. There we can imagine – as is vividly recalled by a contemporary chronicler – the hubbub of the jurors gathering from all over the shire, ‘the villagers filled the corners of the courtyard and the crossing places in town discussing and conferring together as to what answers they should give. Then when the questions were put to them they made their statements, which were set down by their clerk.’
What the jurymen declared for the two Kibworths and Smeeton is revealed in the Bodleian Library copy of Burton’s notebook. The transcript is the first to name the ordinary tenants in the villages, the freeholding families who can be traced sometimes for hundreds of years onwards through the story of the village. First of all is Smeeton. Divided into five or six small manors, Smeeton was a prosperous place, with a dozen free tenants including the Astens, the Alens and Hugh Hasting (all of whom have Scandinavian surnames) and Walter Wodard and his sons Robert and Richard – kinsmen of John Wodard, whom we met in 1264. The Latimers in particular become well-to-do gentry and will play an important role in the Lollard movement in the fifteenth century. By contrast Kibworth Beauchamp, as we suspected from Domesday Book, was a village of unfree workers. Burton’s transcript tells us that nearly 500 acres here were held by peasant families in villeinage from the Earl of Warwick. Burton shows that the Hundred Rolls jurors reported that there were only two free tenancies in the entire village of Beauchamp, part of one held by an old village family, that of Will Harm (another Scandinavian name), who had sixty acres. As for the unfree, there were over forty-five families of villeins and serfs farming those 500 acres at Beauchamp, and the acreages indicated by Burton’s transcript suggest an expansion of arable by a couple of hundred acres in the previous thirty years as new land was cleared and put under the plough: pushing to the margins of the village to feed the ever-growing population.
In Kibworth Harcourt too the Hundred Rolls give us our first detail on the village families. There are wealthy peasants like Henry Person who had his own aula, a small open aisled hall of a kind found for the first time among the peasantry in the late thirteenth century. (A rare if not unique surviving peasants’ hall mentioned in the 1279 survey is Ryders Farm at Swavesey in Cambridgeshire.) Then come the free peasant proprietors – Nicholas Faber, William Reynes, Robert Polle, Robert Hering, Richard son of Roger, Matilda daughter of Nicholas Faber, John Boton and John Sibil. These are the key peasant families in the village, some like Hering perhaps descended from Viking settlers.
Let us leave the Gartree Hundred jury in the hubbub of the Great Hall in Leicester. King Edward’s commissioners and their scribes are at their long table piled with documents, Henry of Nottingham, Henry of Sheldon and John of Arundel conferring below the towering roof with its huge oak aisle posts. There are the last-minute questions: the status of William Beauchamp’s free tenant in Smeeton, Geoffrey of Dalby; the size of the virgates rented by the nine bondmen. And the small print: the pound of peppercorn for Henry Person’s hall, the bushel of wheat for benseed and eighteen sheaves of oats for foddercorn, three hens and a cock yearly and five eggs at Easter.
But as the jury set their seal to their account of Kibworth it was clear that a new situation had arisen in Harcourt. In the aftermath of the Barons’ Revolt and Montfort’s death, Saer de Harcourt’s village had been carved up into five separate manors besides the holdings of the main families of free peasants. Four of these were now in the hands of southern aristocrats, from Worthing near Brighton, Portsmouth and Ewell in Surrey: kinsmen and kinswomen of an important grandee who had taken the king’s side in the Civil War and now reaped his reward. The fifth and largest part of Kibworth Harcourt, the jurymen had reported, was now under a new lord, ‘The House of Scholars of Walter of Merton in Oxford’. How this had come about, and the extraordinary role Merton College will have in the lives of the people of the village, is the subject of the next chapter in our story.