Simon de Montfort’s bloodied head was sent to Lady Mortimer, his testicles pinned to his nose; his tarred limbs were set above the gates of Gloucester with a placard advertising his treachery. But Montfort was not forgotten. Among the gentry Simon became a heroic figure, around whom popular tales, songs and even miracle stories gathered: he was the priceless flower, la flur de pris ‘who died unflinchingly (sauntz feyntise) like Thomas the martyr of Canterbury’, who had also stood bravely against royal power. The recent discovery of a parchment genealogical roll with an account of Simon’s deeds scribbled on the back shows the tale was recited in noble houses among sympathizers even seventy years later. His grave and death site almost immediately became places of pilgrimage whose reputation for healing spread as far as Devon and Northumberland, and even France. In 1273, still bruised by his fines, Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a former knight of Simon, made a 300-mile round trip from Essex to the well and the church. There he was ‘measured’ at Simon’s tomb with a length of tallow which was then cut for burning in prayer lamps back home. One of his ancestors, also Robert, had been among the twenty-five ‘guardians’ of Magna Carta.
But it was not just upper-class supporters who had lost out in the revolt. Memories of the brief flowering of the great enterprise and its articulation of the community of the realm were held even by the peasants in the village. An Evesham Abbey manuscript records nearly 200 miracles in the late 1260s and early 1270s at the Battle Well and these were presumably only a small portion of satisfied customers. They were people of all social ranks: village constables, a carpenter, a miller, tailors, countesses and lords, and even two ‘masters of the University of Oxford’. This is a sign of how Montfort had transcended class and status. At his tomb an earl could rub shoulders with a paralysed woman brought in a wheelbarrow on a ten-week trip by her devoted husband. Villagers from the Kibworth area were among those who came here on pilgrimage, keeping vigil at the well, drinking the holy water, washing afflicted limbs in it, and taking it off in bottles for neighbours back in the village. Margery from the neighbouring hamlet of Burton Overy spent the night in hope of a miracle, and, ‘by the testimony of the whole village’, her eyes were healed. The pond is still there and local tradition remembers that it was still used to bathe eye infections into the twentieth century.
In Kibworth the effects of the failed revolution were especially far-reaching; indeed, in Harcourt they would influence the villagers’ lives from that day to this. In Kibworth Beauchamp the landlords were the king’s pantlers; but on the other side of the parish Saer de Harcourt as we have seen had been a knight of Simon’s retinue. In the immediate aftermath of Evesham the king’s men plundered Saer’s estates at Newton Harcourt and Kibworth – perhaps, indeed, the Beauchamps were among the king’s vengeful partisans. Inevitably, as the bitter fallout of Simon’s defeat unfolded, Saer’s estates came under close royal scrutiny. Saer’s family had run the village for a century and a half or more. They had never been resident, preferring their Oxfordshire estate at Stanton Harcourt with its easy access to the court in London and Windsor, but now having taken the barons’ side, Saer (who had survived the disaster) forfeited his lordship and was imprisoned to await trial for treason.
That November while Saer was in prison the king’s assessors rode into Kibworth, summoned the village scribe and jurymen, and took an account of the whole village to find out exactly what Saer was worth. In the filing system of the king’s archives, now in the National Archives in Kew, is a roll recording this inquisition along with the fines imposed on the king’s enemies, including Saer. Saer, it says, was forgiven and conditionally restored by the king, who ‘remitting his indignation and rancour of mind, pardons him for all trespasses committed by him during the time when the disturbances took place in the land’. On the back of the manuscript a royal filing clerk has jotted Saer’s name to make it easier to locate on a twelve-foot parchment roll. Saer was to be ‘mainprized of good behaviour’ but still had to face his punishment. He was subject to swingeing fines and like the other pardoned Montfortians was only allowed to redeem his estates for seven times their annual value. Saer’s finances were already in a mess – he had considerable debts to Jewish moneylenders – and he was forced to sell up. In the wings now is a new character in our story: Walter of Merton, founder of the ‘House of Scholars’ of Merton College, Oxford.
Enter Walter of Merton
A wealthy Surrey grandee, Walter of Merton was a royalist, a former chancellor and ‘a man of great liberality and great worldly learning’. Five years or so before, in 1261, Merton had set aside land to found a new ‘house of scholars residing at the schools at Oxford’; he was now looking for estates with which to endow his foundation with an income from rents. Once Bishop of Rochester, Walter had been stripped of his office by the barons after Lewes, during the summer of rage of 1264. In that brief heady time Montfort’s troops had run amock: their peasant soldiers, John Wodard and his friends perhaps among them, burned barns on Walter’s estates at his native village of Merton and at Chessington in Surrey, where manor buildings were looted and fired by the rebels. Walter then had every reason to look on Saer with a vengeful gaze and to view his lands with a calmly covetous eye.
The purchase of Kibworth Harcourt was a long-drawn-out process. Medieval property deals could be no less complicated than today, and there were several leaseholds for Walter to buy up. Saer’s bonds to Jewish moneylenders and his debt to a London merchant, on which he had remortgaged part of his property, all needed to be sorted out. The first stage in all this for the people of Kibworth was the king’s examination of the holdings of all his enemies. The inquisition of the extent of Saer de Harcourt’s lands at Kibworth from November 1265 in the bruising aftermath of Evesham still survives in the National Archives in faded ink on crumpled vellum. The commissioning writ mentions that Saer was then in prison, perhaps as a result of his capture at Evesham. The jurors came not just from Kibworth but also from Newton Harcourt and Glen. Among the Kibworthians are men from what will become well-known village families: ‘Robert Aaron of Kybbewrth, William of Reyns of the same, Hugh of the same and William Harin of the same.’
Produced for the king’s ministers to assess Saer’s entire wealth as preparation for confiscation or valuation, the document needs only a little brushing up to meet the standards of a modern estate agent’s brochure. This then is a sketch of the village of Kibworth Harcourt and its people in the aftermath of the Barons’ Revolt:
(1) One manor house and nine virgates of land in the lord’s demesne. Virgates in Kibworth were thirty acres, so this is around 270 acres altogether. Value £7 12s per annum.
(2) Eighteen and a half virgates of land (=555 acres) held in villeinage, each virgate worth 16s per annum i.e. from the sale of the surplus of the villeins’ labour = £14 16s income per annum. With these virgates scattered across the common fields come twenty-nine villeins, who each hold a half-virgate, and four who hold one virgate each. These peasants and their families were tied, coming with the estate, and could not leave without the lord’s permission. As terms of villeinage differed from manor to manor, Walter would have been given the full details of services, dues, and any particular local customs and rights.
(3) Rents from eleven free tenants and seven cottagers amounting to 38s 10d per annum. Some of these eleven free tenants must have been the descendants of the six free tenants, the sokemen and sokewomen of Domesday Book in 1086: some of their plots had evidently been subdivided over time. The cottagers did not own land, but held their cottages on the lord’s land with specified labour dues.
(4) One mill worth 26s 8d per annum in rents. An innovation of the thirteenth century, the mill was a new post mill built by Saer’s family as landlords. It may have been the predecessor of the one that still stands north-east of the village, rebuilt in the eighteenth century. Again the terms of use and tenants’ share of repair costs varied between estates, and a prospective buyer would have been informed of the specific terms under which tenants had to mill their corn at the lord’s mill.
(5) A render of four capons at Christmas worth 6d. Perhaps this was due from each unfree tenant. A later schedule also mentions one pound of pepper as an annual render.
Kibworth Harcourt at this point was clearly an arable village. The total extent of the ploughlands may have been about 825 acres. The total value of the manor was said to be £26 0s 8d per annum. Offers in the region of ten times the annual income were common in land deals in the thirteenth century, possibly more, given extras. An offer in the region of £400 would cover Saer’s fine. For a prospective purchaser Saer’s situation was complicated by his debts, but these complications were surmountable and Walter went ahead with the purchase.
The purchase document survives in Walter’s foundation in Oxford, Merton College, in the thirteenth-century muniments tower. Stone-built to protect the college’s estate archive from the risk of fire, the archive room is lined with wooden cupboards whose polished drawers are painted with the names of Merton’s manors, from Ponteland up beyond the Tyne in Northumberland, to little Cuxham near Oxford, and Cheddington, Thorncroft and Ibstone – Walter’s old estates around his native Merton in Surrey. There are three capacious drawers of Kibworth land documents. The purchase deed is almost pristine, a small folded pale piece of parchment bearing the wax seal of Saer de Harcourt. As for the £400 Walter paid: the annual value of £26 in 1265 is worth more than £13,300 today on the Retail Price Index; but more than £308,000 using average earnings. The purchase price in 2010 would be £205,000 on the RPI but getting on for £5m on the average earnings index. Today Country Life gives a good idea of what Walter was getting – but Kibworth came with its workforce too.
The purchase seems to have gone through (at least on parchment) in a friendly manner. The Montfortians’ aims had been abhorrent to Walter, but he was too intelligent to be blind to the tensions which had given rise to Saer’s espousal of Simon’s cause. So despite the fact that his Surrey estates had been plundered by Simon’s rebels, Walter’s tone was one of relaxed bonhomie between gentlemen, addressing Saer as his socius and amicus, suggesting a high table ‘my dear fellow’. Time to let bygones be bygones.
We have already encountered the Merton archive in this story, and it is now time to introduce it more fully. This amazing treasure trove of English social life is a historian’s delight. Among its many holdings it contains rolls for Kibworth from the 1270s to the early 1700s; rentals from the reign of Henry III to 1527; and bailiffs’ accounts year by year from 1283 to 1682 (some membranes are even sewn with their original tally sticks labelled ‘Cybbeworthe’). In addition there is a rich miscellany of lease books, tithing lists, repair bills, building accounts, letters, family deeds and miscellaneous files and bundles of deeds. The college also holds a series of maps of Kibworth, beginning with two wonderful painted plans of 1609 and 1635 which depict all the village houses with their freeholders and tenants named. The archive even contains a letter from the village butcher, John Pychard, to the fellows of the college in 1447 – it’s a real rarity to have a peasant’s letter from such an early date. Though the college sold its houses in Kibworth after the Second World War, it still owns fields and one of the farms in the village, and still plays a role in the community, with triennial visits from the Warden and concerts by the Merton choir in Kibworth church.
So from this point in the story, along with the poll taxes and hearth taxes and the surviving court rolls for Beauchamp kept in the National Archives in Kew, for Kibworth Harcourt we have the record of an English village from the thirteenth century till now. In the thirteenth-century muniments tower, the oldest custom-built archive repository in Britain, and in the college library, the oldest continuously working library in the world, one of the most interesting caches of documents in British history gives us the names, houses and jobs of everyone who lived in the village for nearly 750 years. Along with a few score other English medieval manors it is one of the best-documented villages in Britain, if not in the world.
The people of Kibworth in 1280
In the 1270s we can thus finally meet the people of the village by name, describe their jobs, define their relationships and map their houses. We can draw family trees, sometimes over many generations, as with the Polles – fifteen generations down to the 1600s – or the Iliffes and the Colmans – from Tudor times until today. The Merton archive does what cannot be done from the centre or from above: supplemented by new finds from archaeology, wills and dendrochronology, it shines an intimate light on an English community. And on the daily lives of ordinary people throughout history.
Walter of Merton’s first act was to draw up a full account of the village, and because of its detail it is one of the most interesting of any thirteenth-century English villages. It was made not long after 1280 (when Walter had initially leased parts of the manor to his three sisters and their husbands – only after a generation or so will the college amalgamate all these holdings). The account is beautifully and clearly written in black ink on a single membrane of vellum, and it begins with the free tenants. These are the lineal (and sometimes no doubt the biological) descendants of the six sokemen and sokewomen numbered in Domesday Book in 1086: inheritors of the free holdings from late-Saxon Kibworth. There are now eleven of them, as we learned from the king’s inquisition of 1265 and from the Hundred Rolls of 1279. But now we have their names and holdings, some of them from the oldest families in the village who can be traced sometimes over several centuries. The eleven freemen and two freewomen each hold half a virgate (fifteen acres) or more:
(1) William de Pek, three virgates.
(2) William de Reynes, half a virgate. A well-off freeholder, twenty years later William had a dozen tenants mainly leasing strips and parcels of land from him – one a kinsman, others younger members of well-established village families such as the Swans, Heyneses, Sibils and Peks. William Reynes is typical of the wheeler-dealing peasant who did well in the boom time of the thirteenth century.
(3) Nicholas Polle, half a virgate. One of the oldest families in the village, the Polles can be followed here until the seventeenth century. They often provided village officials, reeves and bailiffs, constables and ale-tasters in the Middle Ages. Nicholas’s father, Robert, had been a freeholder in the 1260s.
(4) Robert Sharon, one virgate.
(5) Nicholas Faber, one virgate. Faber was the village blacksmith. His daughter Matilda had also held one virgate in 1279 but had now married and moved into another village family.
(6) Richard, son of Roger Faber, one virgate.
(7) Henry Polle, half a virgate. Henry belonged to the second branch of the Polles: they had an extensive kin group in the village in the thirteenth century with four separate households and clearly were long-established Kibworth people, perhaps from pre-1066.
(8) Henry Boton, half a virgate plus a quarter. Henry had inherited from his father John, who had been a freeman in 1279.
(9) John Sibil, a quarter-virgate. In addition a tenant, his younger brother Adam, rented five and a half virgates from him. Their father was probably the John who held half a virgate in 1279; but their family name came from a woman who was probably their grandmother, a widowed single parent, whose name was taken by her male descendants and whose story is explored in more detail below. The Sibils are another of the well-recorded peasant families in Kibworth who provide village officials and chaplains over the next century or more. Adam subsequently leased land to nine separate tenants, mainly again the younger children of neighbours, the Peks, Swans, Polles, Heyneses and the chaplain dominus, John Godwin.
(10) John Sibil, one messuage (a dwelling house and its plot) held from Henry Person at a rent of 1s 6d plus an annual rent of a pound of pepper, which presumably John bought from a spicer in Leicester or Harborough. (Henry Person had been a freeholder in 1279 but migrated from the village.)
(11) William Brown, one messuage, a housing plot, rent 1d. William, son of Robert Brown, was a freeman with no land, and a tiny holding, though no doubt he rented strips in the open field from one of his neighbours. The Brown family can be traced in Kibworth from the middle of the thirteenth century until Tudor times; one branch became drapers in Coventry and eventually moved to London (see pp. 247–54).
(12) Alice and Matilda Sterre. Very likely these sisters were unmarried or possibly widowed: no children appear later bearing this name and the family disappears from the village.
Those are the free tenants who together held fifteen and a half virgates: eleven holdings and just over 450 acres spread through the three great fields. They and their children were free to move in law, but owed rent to their landlord for their house, garden and allotment, and for their strips in the open fields.
Then the survey lists a further twenty-seven customary tenants or villeins, whose houses probably ran along the north side of Main Street. They include other branches of the Polles, Sibils and Heyneses, along with the Godyers, Godwins and Carters, and Radulf the reeve. The Hugh Harcourt who appears here as a customary tenant could be a man who had taken the name of his lord; or he could be a poor relative left by a lesser branch of the famous family. The name Harcourt is long-lasting as a peasant surname in the village – the religious sisters Mary and Margaret still owned land in Kibworth in the early fifteenth century.
Also among the villeins were other long-lasting families. Hugh Silvester and Emma Gilbert were both people whose descendants will play a dramatic role in the Lollard risings of the fifteenth century. A villein holding half a virgate, Emma was not alone as a woman tenant. Among the villeins was Beatrice Sibil, whose family we have already met, and ‘widow Scolate’, another matriarch whose sons and descendants will take her name as their family name, and who, as we shall see, left a special mark on the village story.
Finally come the cottagers (twelve in number) who had tied cottages on the lord’s land, probably simple mud and thatch tofts along the south of Main Street, for which they paid 2s a year rent. This list is especially interesting because for the first time it gives us specific jobs in the village. There are a skinner and a shepherd. Robert the thresher (triturator) is evidently the man who threshed grain for people who couldn’t do their own, probably for a small cut of the sack. Like a number of women in the village, Alice Godwine was perhaps a brewster.
Two men, Robert and William, are named as brokers (brochars). These might have been wool dealers in a village where sheep were valuable. Though the word can also mean a tapster, in the fourteenth century it is often used as a shopkeeper, middle man or buyer and seller; the poet Langland for example uses it as a metaphor: ‘a brochar of backbiting, a buyer and seller of discord’. So perhaps these were dealers who bought commodities at regional markets and sold in Kibworth at a small profit. In the fourteenth century there were several people like that in Kibworth, including men who ‘brokered’ horses and other livestock at Lutterworth fair, and bought goods at Hallaton and Harborough markets.
Finally at the bottom of the list come Roger the miller; Alice the washerwoman, the woman who washed clothes at the public spring; and, most intriguing, Robert medico. In this society disease was an ever-present fact for both humans and animals. Doctors were valued people in the community: they are found in some East Anglian villages in the twelfth century and no doubt existed even in the Anglo-Saxon countryside. Robert was a former bonded serf who had been manumitted a few years before; he was perhaps an expert in country medicine who doubled as the village vet.
Women in the village
Most women were involved in producing food, and many married women are named as brewsters in the Kibworth court records – ale being an important part of the medieval diet. Isolda Osbern for example had a forty-year career as a brewster from 1320 to 1359. She’s notable for being involved in a large number of court cases with her neighbours for unpaid debts, for raising false hue and cry, and on a couple of occasions for wrongfully appropriating other people’s goods, especially their grain, which she used in her brewing.
Most married women in Kibworth helped their husbands in the field; single or unmarried women cultivated their own land, perhaps with the help of sons or kinsmen or neighbours. But it was not unusual for women to handle the plough themselves with a small plough team or to lead the team with a goad while the man steered the plough. Along with the free-holding Sterre sisters, the villein’s widow Scolate, Beatrice Sibil and Emma Gilbert, three women are named as subtenants of field strips: Alice and Amabil Heynes, and Matilda Bonde, and they presumably worked as farmers alongside the men of the village.
An interesting group of women though emerges in the early documents for Kibworth, two of whom in particular gave their name to very long-lasting kin groups. These were clearly in some way important women in the peasant community, but as they lived just before the horizon of detailed documents, we cannot know precisely why. Most interesting is the kin group in the village which derived its name from a widow called Sibil. She may have been Sibil, the wife of Henry Thurd, who appears in a court case in 1252; but if so it is a solitary appearance and she was dead before the main Merton documents start in the late 1260s. But her name is in the earliest rentals as the by-name of her sons: Ivo ‘son of Sybile’, a nativus (serf ) who held half a virgate. In the court roll of 1280, John, a son of Sibil sued Nicholas Polle for assault and battery. By the 1290s the surname had already become hereditary: Ivo is now ‘Ivo Sybile’ – he was elected one of the chief pledges of the manor of Kibworth Harcourt in 1291 and was appointed an ale-taster round the same time. By then the clan was numerous and extended. One of the tithing lists of this period – a crucial document in the social history of the village – lists over 140 males above the age of twelve in the manor, including Robert Sibile, his sons Roger and William, Ivo Sibile, William Sibile and Alexander Sibile. Robert, who occurs frequently in court rolls between 1280 and 1291, held a virgate in unfree tenure (he is listed in Merton’s first survey of Kibworth); he had been village reeve in 1287. Ivo had a daughter, Matilda, who was a brewster between 1281 and 1298 and is most often described as Matilda Sibile, but also as ‘Matilda the daughter of Ivo Sibile’.
Such detail drawn from one tiny portion of the Kibworth court rolls shows how one family begins to rise in village society. By the last decade of the thirteenth century the Sibiles have become a powerful influence in the village, led by the Roberts senior and junior. Robert senior was now holding the significant office for the college of custodies aulae et curiae and Robert the younger was chief pledge – an important position of trust in the village held by more than one of the clan in the next few decades. Being a pledge meant standing surety for other villagers in a variety of circumstances in the manorial court, whether in cases of debt or trespass or over admissions to new tenancies or as a guarantor of good behaviour. Some of these customary obligations could be quite long term – for example, standing as a pledge for the maintenance of tenements – and, like other unpaid elected offices in the village, pledging has to be seen as an important aspect of reciprocity in the community, as well as a means of gaining status and ‘symbolic capital’.
The Sibile kin group continued to thrive in the fourteenth century. Prominent in the rolls in the 1330s and 1340s are a group of women – Constance, Agnes, Emma and Joan Sibil, along with the black sheep of the family, William, son of Alexander Sibil, who was accused of housebreaking in 1349, the year of the Black Death, and for battery in 1352. The most important fourteenth-century member though was Adam, who was active from 1320 to 1348. Adam held a virgate; he was often elected by his fellow villagers as chief pledge and ale-taster in the 1320s and 1330s.
These few details from the family story show how important even unfree peasants could be in the communal functioning of the village. As with other families like the Polles, who also had a large kin network, many of them unfree, the trend towards hereditary naming developed early among the most influential families in the community. If only we knew more about the materfamilias, Sibil, who must have lived in the mid-1200s, and was one of the interesting class of single women – some unmarried, some who had refused marriage, some widowed young, some even divorced. Sibil perhaps was widowed when she was young but by force of character she left her mark on village society.
A second fascinating case study in the Merton court rolls concerns a family whose name again derived from that of a Kibworth widow. Her name appears in many different forms as ‘widow Scholas’, Scola, Scolate and Scolastica. In a rental of the late thirteenth century she is described as a nativa: a bonded unfree peasant tied to the estate. In the account for 1284, 18d is received from Scolastica vidua, while in a rental of 1300 she appears as Scolacia. The court scribe evidently had a great deal of trouble spelling her name. In other rentals and extents and court rolls she is described even more obscurely as Scolasse, Scolac’ vidua, Scholace le vediwe and Scolasse vidua. But she is never described by any relationship to a male – except her sons. In her widowhood she was identified simply by her forename, unusual within the community of the village, and by her status as widow, without a reference to a husband. Her sons in the 1290s, named John and Hugh, are called sons of Scolstice or Scolac and her name is found as the family surname through the fourteenth century. Her grandson, Robert, was chief pledge in the 1330s and his younger brother John was executor of Robert’s will after he died in the Black Death in 1349. After this the family were well-established tenants: John junior and his wife Agnes appear still as nativi in the 1381 poll tax.
Scholastica raises as many intriguing questions as Sibil of Kibworth, especially as she was a nativa, a serf. Was her husband an outsider, owning no land in the village, who had died young? Had her tenanted land which she was able to hand on to her sons come down through her father, perhaps because she had no brothers?
Her name, Scholastica, is not uncommon at this time. St Scholastica was the devoted sister of St Benedict of Nursia. Her tale is told in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and was popular in Anglo-Saxon times. She later appears in Caxton’s Golden Legend; but her life is told in the South English legendary in Scholastica of Kibworth’s own lifetime in around 1270–80. So it was the kind of story well-known to English peasants, people like her parents. The saint’s day was 10 February, a widely observed feast day in the thirteenth century. Perhaps it was the Kibworth Scholastica’s birthday.
The peasant landmarket
The Kibworth of Sibil and Scholastica, of Robert the doctor and Alice the washerwoman was not a closed community in the 1290s. Men and women moved widely on pilgrimage and business, to find work, and sometimes even to find love (one young peasant woman followed her lover all the way from Leicestershire up to St Andrews in Fife at this time). Kibworth peasants frequently carried corn by cart on behalf of the college to Leicester and to other places in the county. Tenants might go in person to petition the fellows of Merton or to pay an entry fine to inherit land in the late thirteenth century. For example, John Thored’s son Robert anxiously made the journey to Oxford to petition to be admitted to half a virgate of the lord’s land; his start in life as an independent farmer.
The treasure trove of documents in Merton also gives us details of commercial life in the village in the 1280s and 1290s which suggest a wide range of personal initiative among the village people. In one case William ‘the chapman’ testified to the court in Kibworth Harcourt that he had been buying goods for another tenant when he lost 4s 11d and three farthings at Yaxley fair thirty miles away in Huntingdonshire. William was clearly a petty trader making purchases on behalf of the village – perhaps what is described in the Merton documents as a ‘broker’. John Walter and his brother also gave money to Chapman, which he spent at Medbourne market seven miles away. Another case in the court book involves the Heynes and Boton families, and concerned a horse that one, Adam, had sold through an agent or middleman (literally an attornatus), William Fauconer, a Smeeton freeman, for 10s in the market at Lutterworth. As early as the thirteenth century men in the village apparently worked as merchants or brokers. In a 1290 list of fines for bad brewing, Isobel of Kibworth is described as the wife of Ivo the merchant.
So people travelled. With the huge rise in population between 1100 and 1300 the roads of England were as full as they were in the seventeenth century. By the time Merton bought Harcourt in around 1270 the villagers already had wide connections and Kibworth people were already migrating to the towns. Guild records from Leicester over the next few decades show Kibworth people working in Leicester as curriers, drapers, skinners and slaters. A draper, Richard of Kibworth, who was tallaged in 1359 and entered on the merchant guild roll in 1362, describes himself as of both Kibworth and Leicester. Robert of Kibworth was a boot- and shoemaker who sold his work in the town; and Roger of Kibworth was an ironmonger who rented a shop in Leicester market. All these men brought their skills from the countryside into the town.
Others migrated elsewhere in the countryside for work. This was especially true after the Black Death, but even in the thirteenth century outsiders migrated into Kibworth, and Kibworth people moved away. Some were seeking marriage. When Agnes Man, the daughter of John Man of Kibworth, married Walter Gretham of Shangton and went to live with him, she paid Merton 2s for permission to move out. On the other hand, when Walter Prechour from Wistow married William Polle’s daughter Alice, another nativa, or tied peasant, he was summoned to Merton’s manor court in Kibworth to do fealty to the landlord before he was allowed to move in. John Asteyn of Kibworth Beauchamp, a member of a very old local family, when he married Agnes Smyth of Kibworth Harcourt moved in with her and took on the annual chevage in order to reside there and be treated as a nativus on Merton’s manor – transferring his unfreedom for love of Agnes! Such was the binding small print of the medieval manorial world.
The marriage horizon for these unions was only two or three miles. Others though moved much further afield. The story of Robert of Kibworth, a Harcourt freeman, does not survive in the Merton archive, but has come down to us because of the accident that the lands he originally owned in the thirteenth century found their way in Tudor times into the possession of the famous Wyggeston Hospital in Leicester, in whose archive the original mortgage documents have been preserved. The story they tell is again one of routine and insignificant daily life, but is revealing nonetheless. Some time in the 1290s ‘Robert of Kibworth’ migrated from Kibworth to Barkeston (today in the wonderfully named parish of Barkestone, Plungar and Redmile). There he may have married, became a landowner and from 1299 enacted a series of land grants dealing with small parcels of land – a selion here, a strip there, later calling himself Robert ‘of Kibworth and Barkeston’. His business dealings in these grants tell us something about Robert’s friends and contacts – his links with trustworthy ‘swearing men’ in other villages. On 21 April 1311 he leased land to a dexter, or dyer, Thomas Dexter of Harborough, his wife Avice and their son Geoffrey. This grant in Barkeston was witnessed by one Richard of Smeeton and Geoffrey the Fleming of Harborough. Market Harborough was one of the many new towns founded in the commercial boom time of the twelfth century and by 1300 was a thriving market and had a small but active commercial life with a couple of dozen craftsmen and artificers, a handful of men described as ‘merchants’, some victuallers and a pool of servants and labourers. Clues to our Kibworth man’s particular line of business lie in his friends’ names: the Harborough dyer and the Fleming. Flemings were prominent in the thriving textile industry which had been the subject of recent government legislation in the form of an export tax on wool. Dyers like the Dexter family used madder, woad and the weld plant for the intense reds, blues and yellows that we see depicted in medieval manuscripts. Outside dyers’ workshops great bundles of weld were hung up to dry with heaps of orchil, safflower, gall nuts and madder root. Other clothing colours came from more rare commodities such as the scarlet crocus grub or imported purple shellfish from the Mediterranean. All these were imported through specialist dealers.
In November 1311, this time down at Harborough, Robert leased back a life interest in the Barkeston strips in exchange ‘for a rose flower given at the Nativity of John the Baptist’. Again Richard of Smeeton was a witness but he was now joined by Adam Andrews of Harborough. Adam’s family are later known as spicers, the kind of people who would have imported dyeing herbs and plants, natural dyes. So Robert is now living in the far north of the shire, in the little promontory that sticks into Nottinghamshire. But his web of contacts across the shire included dyers, cloth workers, and dye and spice importers in the south of the shire at Harborough. And among the witnesses was a Smeeton man presumably known to Robert from his early days in Kibworth.
The last grant in the series is dated 25 April 1317. In it Robert grants to one William Grant of Barkby rights in some land held from the Harborough dyer, only calling himself now Robert Lound. (Had he adopted his wife’s family as a ‘newcomer’ or was this a new place of residence? Lound is on the eastern border of the shire north of Stamford.)
Involved with a Fleming, a draper and a dyer, Robert then was very likely in textiles: perhaps a wool dealer or sheep breeder. His field of operations was the whole shire from Barkeston in the north, to Smeeton next to his native Kibworth, and Harborough down south on the Northamptonshire border. A small operator, Robert of Kibworth was typical of a whole class of freemen in the late thirteenth century, migrating, buying, selling and generally wheeler-dealing; he was the tip of the iceberg in a very active peasant initiative in the land market, using the written charter and professional literacy.
Robert’s documents are of no great significance in the scheme of things in history – they are the entirely chance survival of a few scraps of the life of a small businessman around 1300. But Robert’s story was the stuff of life for many free English people in the thirteenth century. It also offers clues about identity, and the fluidity of names around 1300. This is the time when English people’s family names begin to be fixed as surnames, partly because of the government’s increasing need to distinguish people more effectively with the exponential growth of documentation; partly no doubt because of the confusing similarity of male names. Surnames in Kibworth don’t really begin to appear till the late thirteenth century – a mix of English, Scandinavian and Norman names. Of eighty-five women’s Christian names in fourteenth-century poll taxes for the three villages in Kibworth, more than half are called one of four names: Agnes (13 times), Alice (14), Amice (10) and Joan (10). Others though offer an attractively wide range – Emma, Milisent, Matilda, Elen, Lora, Beatrice, Isolda, Dionisia, Juliana, Felicia, Rose, Sarra and Isobel. Far less imagination is shown by parents with boys’ names. By now old English names were becoming unfashionable; with French-speaking rulers and administrators it was best to use Norman names, especially if one wanted to get on in the new craft and trade guilds in Leicester and Coventry. Nearly half the Kibworth men at this time are called John, with Robert, Richard and William coming behind. Men’s names in the village have none of the pleasing variety of women’s names and by the early 1300s there is little trace of Old English names. Only in a few surnames, pretty much fixed by the 1320s, more or less definitively by the 1370s, do we still glimpse older village histories: the Swans and Asteyns in Beauchamp; the Thords, Godyers and Godwins in Harcourt; the job descriptions in surnames like the Carters, Chapmans and Wodards. Now it is newcomers who catch the eye: men from Naseby and Sibbertoft in Northamptonshire; and even, in Beauchamp in 1381, the cottager Gregory the ‘Welshman’ and ‘Adam Onele’. Could Adam have been Irish? In fourteenth-century Kibworth it would not have been impossible.
Dark clouds, strange omens
From the Merton documents a picture of Kibworth emerges in its social life and even its physical layout. Documents from the same time also give us the names of the free families in Smeeton (still including the Swans, Astins and Harms whose ancestors we met in the Viking Age) and list the fifty dependent peasants, villeins and serfs who with their families formed the workforce at Beauchamp. Allowing for omissions they suggest a population of well over 250 people in Beauchamp and the best part of 800 people in the whole parish of Kibworth around 1300. This is nearly three times what it was in 1086, and must have greatly increased the pressures on land, housing and employment. The community was thriving and had much more arable under the plough than in Victoria’s day. But there were warning signs, including rising prices, inflation and the increased subdividing of plots as free families tried to provide for their children in an increasingly crowded countryside. Court books across the country show that more and more young people were on the move at this time looking for work, seeking a new village under a new lord. Kibworth by then (if we can speak of the whole parish) had a market with a diversified economy and the population of a small town. But in the 1290s a strong run of bad winters and dry summers signalled a longer-term disruptive weather regime. At first a mote in the mind’s eye, but now, and perhaps not just in hindsight, a pattern began to emerge which will culminate in a catastrophic sequence of famine and pestilence and the breakdown of the whole system.
These natural phenomena were preceded by signs and omens. This was an age which gave full credence to the supernatural, and these pointers to the inauspicious were taken seriously as the precursors of the dark forces which would threaten the precarious balance of life in the unending battle against want and disorder. In manuscripts around the turn of 1300, along with the first social poetry, political songs and the complaints of the workers against the excesses of the rich, comes a renewed interest in dreams and ancient prophecies. In one manuscript rules for foretelling the weather are coupled with a dark prognostication for the year 1302 by ‘Master Meloaus, the Greek’. Addressed ‘to all Christians’ it speaks of great misfortunes: earthquakes, famines and wars, the division of realms and of peoples, beginning on a specified September day. And at the bottom of the page a note in French assures the reader that ‘all these things which were prophesied indeed took place.’
Two hundred years after the Conquest the stage is set for the next phase of history in England and the village, an incredibly dramatic one, which now we can tell through real people’s stories, through families like the Polles, the Browns and the Sibils. Their community had gone through the Dark Ages and the age of the Vikings, and had been radically reshaped by the Anglo-Saxon kings of the tenth century. They had endured the Norman occupation and found their own voice in the constitutional rebellion of the 1260s. They had developed consultative institutions from the hundred courts to the field juries, they used charters to buy property and even on occasion went to the king’s court to argue their rights. Though villeins everywhere faced discrimination, and serfs and slaves often lived desperate lives on marginal land, still the village was a community with communal rights, obligations and work practices. There were now markets everywhere where they could sell their surplus and even in Kibworth it was possible to buy a piece of silk, or a pound of pepper. As had been the case from the tenth century the law had power over life and death, with a gallows in every manor. But already there are hints in the village of a fundamental shift in British history from a feudal order to capitalism: the shift from labour dues to money rents. As always in history, change was constant, the ongoing process of the growth of society, always in the making, never made.
In the last days of the thirteenth-century boom time the village population (like that of England generally) has expanded to levels it will not reach again until 1800. Marginal land is straining and fertility waning. Crowds of landless men are walking the roads of England seeking security in an increasingly troubled world. And in Harcourt there’s a new landlord. What will the lordship of an Oxford college mean to the villagers, the freemen with their timber-framed houses on Main Street, the villeins in their mud and thatch homes, and the serfs, with their wicker hovels and pigs in the forest; the freeborn English with their strips in the common field? And how will they all cope with the catastrophes about to engulf them?