Night fell with a chill damp air and a smoky mist near the Sussex coast on 14 October 1066. The dead and dying were strewn in heaps on the low ridge at the edge of the Downs. (Marked now by the ruins of Battle Abbey, the place was then known to the English only by a local landmark, ‘the old hoar apple tree’.) Among the ‘flower of the English’ were the thegns who had stuck by the king, perhaps Aelfric, son of Meriet, and Edwin of Kibworth among them. Picking their way through the blood-streaked mud, the dead horses and smashed war gear, a party of Normans with burning torches searched the broken bodies where the standards had stood, looking for the English king’s corpse – or what was left of it. At one stroke England had fallen.
In the immediate shock of defeat we all reach for old consolations to explain shattering events and that autumn the English were no different. ‘The Normans had possession of the battlefield,’ wrote the Anglo-Saxon chronicler with gritted teeth, as God had granted them victory because of ‘the nation’s sins’. It must have seemed as good an explanation as any of the scarcely credible chain of events in autumn 1066 which had led up to the battle of Hastings. Many other explanations have been offered by historians since that time as to how the richest nation state in Western Europe fell to a small army of Norman knights, mercenaries and adventurers who had chanced their arm on the greatest prize, hitching their star to the fortunes of William of Normandy.
The Conqueror’s coronation in Westminster Abbey at Christmas 1066 had been with the consent of the chief nobles. The allegiance of the people was another matter. Over the next three years he set about subduing England to his rule through warfare, a scorched-earth policy and ruthless repression. Siege causeways were pushed into the Fens, mobile towers and battering rams broke the walls of picturesque former Roman cities like Exeter; deliberate devastation of the countryside was the order of the day wherever there was opposition. But despite the completeness of the defeat at Hastings the scale of resistance was surprising, and it provoked fury: ‘In those early days,’ wrote one Norman later, ‘wherever they could the English laid secret ambushes for the hated race of the Normans, and, when opportunity offered, killed them secretly in the woods and in remote places. In revenge the Norman kings and their ministers, devising exquisite kinds of tortures, raged against the English.’
The Norman army spent the first few years marching, fighting and killing, its path marked by columns of smoke and savage reprisals against the English. The battle hardened Norman knights and mercenaries in the north deliberately engineered a humanitarian disaster, which left a desperate peasantry ‘eating grass and rats’ and even resorting to cannibalism and selling their own children into slavery. In the Midlands the Normans brought devastation to the rich farming lands around Kibworth. Leicester was besieged and stormed by William the Conqueror; the town was sacked and partly burned, and a large portion of the city destroyed. One hundred and twenty houses were levelled to build a castle by the Soar on the southern edge of the Anglo-Danish borough. After the destruction William handed over a huge part of the shire – some sixty estates formerly under the rule of the Earl of Mercia – to a man who had been with him at Hastings, Hugh Grandmesnil.
In his mid-thirties, a formidable horseman and fighter like his master, Hugh was hard-bitten, masterful and inured to war, displaying that mixture of cruelty and ostentatious piety that characterized a medieval nobleman. For his loyalty he received over a hundred English manors from William, the majority around Leicester, his centre of power, where he was now sheriff. As part of the clampdown Grandmesnil built castles in his main strongpoints and on key routes. On the route between Welland and Leicester castles were constructed at Hallaton, and it appears at Kibworth too. On the track which later became the A6, they cleared and levelled the Anglo-Saxon lord’s demesne, barns and ox sheds, demolishing a row of peasants’ cottages south of ‘the king’s highway through the village’. To save time and effort the Normans earmarked the Roman burial tumulus at the Munt as the core of their motte, the conical mound with its palisaded platform which formed the strongpoint and last refuge inside a Norman castle. They assembled the village reeves and press-ganged the villagers into the ditch-digging and construction work, organizing carts and oxen for shifting timber and bringing smiths to on-site foundries to manufacture nails. Norman sappers were adept at carrying prefabricated castles with them and knocking them together at speed, but here they probably had the time to commandeer a local labour unit who brought cut timbers by wagon and ox team from Gumley woods. The reeves would provide the tools from the manor store, as listed in their estate memoranda: ‘axes, adzes, awls, plane, saw, auger, mattock, crow-bar, spade, shovel’, to shape the tree trunks on site before they were positioned to make the palisades and platforms.
That at least is how it may be imagined. No certain proof has yet been found that the Munt was a Norman castle. It has played such a major part in the village story from the Romans to the Jarrow marchers, but it has had no scientific excavation and over the last two centuries has been too badly disturbed for magnetometry to reveal the shadow of any timber buildings under the soil. As we saw in the first chapter, the mound was dug two or three times in the nineteenth century and cut with massive trenches, so its size and shape can only be estimated now from the account of John Nichols in the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless Nichols gives us enough to indicate with a fair degree of certainty that at some point it was reshaped into a motte and bailey castle. He describes a motte about thirty-five metres wide and six high. It is now only four metres in height but in the Middle Ages it was probably twice that; the flat area on top is still about twenty-two metres across. The motte was surrounded by a ditch about eight metres wide and two deep: similar dimensions to known Norman mounds at Hallaton and Gilmorton, and identical to another castle belonging to Hugh Grandmesnil at Ingarsby. The remains of an entrance causeway six metres wide were once visible on the south-west; and Nichols says that on the south side of the motte a further ditch projected for about forty metres with a bank eight metres wide and still nearly a metre high. This was most likely part of the outer bailey.
Traces of the outer bailey have long since disappeared under the widening of the A6 and modern house building, but inside the bailey were a barn, stables, living quarters and, if other excavated castle sites are a guide, an oven, pottery kiln, querns, leather workshop and a smithy. In short, a small military-industrial complex was thrown up right on top of the village, with a view from the tower all the way down Main Street and across to Leicester Forest. The platform on the keep was now the highest point on the Kibworth ridge and could receive fire signals from Leicester to the north and the Welland valley to the south. A visible symbol of oppression, the castle and its earthworks were a raw scar on the landscape that left a deep mark in the English imagination. As a chronicler wrote in 1086, William ‘oppressed the poor people of the English everywhere by building castles’.
So the Norman yoke fell on Kibworth, its overlord now Hugh Grandmesnil and his local subtenant who lived on site with his men-at-arms. It was the beginning of a long process of dispossession across the kingdom. Castles were built throughout this part of the Midlands, by Hugh himself in Groby, others in Sapcote, Hallaton, Hinckley, Mountsorrel and Castle Donington. In all these places Normans lived on the spot, an armed foreign presence, and on other castle sites at Gilmorton and Ingarsby. When the Kibworth reeve and his fellow jurymen testified for Domesday at the Gartree in the spring of 1086 they gave their account of the village and its peasants. They noted tight-lipped (if it is possible to read between the lines of such an austerely bureaucratic record) that a new addition to their community was ‘one Frenchman’.
The Domesday Survey: Kibworth in 1086
It took many years of fighting to subdue the country after the invasion. The most brutal kind of military occupation was made worse by the inability of the Normans to communicate with the conquered except through interpreters. There was immense disruption, with the destruction of crops and death everywhere. The murder of unfree villeins was not even a matter to take to court. But with so much confiscation of property, so many disputes over ownership being brought before the law, the time came to draw a line under what had happened and produce a definitive account of the state of the country. To that end, twenty years after the Conquest, the Conqueror met his councillors at Gloucester over Christmas 1085 and had ‘deep speech’ about England: ‘What kind of land it was, and the nature of its people.’ Out of this council came the decision to commission a great survey of England, village by village, manor by manor.
Early in spring 1086 William’s circuit judges came to the local meeting place at the ‘Gartree thorn’ to take the sworn testimony of the local juries from the Gartree Hundred. The Saxons Aelfmaer, Aelfric and Edwin of Kibworth may have been killed at Hastings or in the northern battles, though Edwin may have been among those who testified to the landholding, population and livestock at the Kibworths and Smeeton, along with people who have left their names in the local community till now, among them Godwin, Oswin, Swan, Haesten and Thored. Once free, but now ‘with a heavy heart’, we can hear their voice in their language: ‘Shame it is to tell, but he thought it no shame to do,’ wrote one disgruntled Englishman; ‘not a pig or an ox or a cow was left uncounted.’ The result was Domesday Book. No longer one book, it is now kept in temperature-controlled conditions in the National Archives in Kew and is available to all online. It is the starting point of the full history of Kibworth as it is for most of the towns and villages of England.
Kibworth in 1086 was not one village but three separate settlements divided into a number of different holdings or manors. So the account the local jury delivered to the king’s circuit judges for the East Midlands is not in one entry but spread over several folios of Domesday Book. In a sense the account is very much of the moment – what was here that spring of 1086, with brief reference to the status quo in 1066. But in another sense the text gives us in shorthand the crystallization of centuries of lordship going back to the Angles and Vikings, with their different customs, languages and local forms of tenure. Kibworth parish as recorded by the Normans had three main villages and no fewer than eight separate manorial lords (it is important to realize that manor and village are not the same: the single village of Smeeton was divided between four or five landowners, a process clearly advanced under the Anglo-Saxon kings long before 1066).
Kibworth Harcourt in 1086, after the Norman conquest
Domesday Book was drawn up for practical purposes and was meant to be of practical use, and was indeed consulted for judgements right up to the twentieth century. It is organized by the fundamental unit of English local administration – the shire – but then each shire is divided into the main landholders in Domesday’s index page. At the top of each shire every landowner is listed, starting with the king, the chief churches, the great lords, then the smaller landowners. Each of these holdings is then organized and cross-referenced under the rubric of the hundred in which the manor stood, Kibworth being in Gartree Hundred. The Anglo-Saxon landlords were gone by then, some maybe killed at Hastings or in its aftermath. The key men are now Normans – Hugh Grandmesnil, Robert of Vessy, Robert de Bucy and Robert ‘Dispensator’ (the Bursar) – who fought and won at Hastings. The Domesday account is so important in the history of the English village that we should give it in full; unavoidably it involves some technical terms, and some eleventh-century bureaucratic language, but a lightly annotated Domesday’s picture of Kibworth is as follows.
Starting in the northern part of Kibworth parish, today’s Kibworth Harcourt (the suffix would come later) was a single manor before the Norman Conquest, as it would be throughout its history. Its land measurements are given in the Danish unit carucates, ‘ploughlands’ (each of 120 acres), and in bovates or ‘oxgangs’ (15 acres). To make the text more clear, these are also given in acres here though they are only an approximation:
Robert (of Veci) holds 12 carucates of land [around 1,400 acres] in Kibworth; before 1066 enough land for 10 ox teams. There are 6 slaves tied to the lord’s land. There are 10 villagers [villeins], 6 freemen [sokemen], 6 smallholders [bordars] and one Frenchman. They have 5 plough teams. There are 16 acres of meadow. Value was 40s in 1066, now 60s.
Domesday also names the Anglo-Saxon landowner: ‘Aelfric son of Meriet held these lands before 1066 and he was a free man.’ This Aelfric, as we have seen, was an important East Midland thegn with lands in Lincolnshire and also in Warwickshire, at Wolvey on the Leicestershire border. In addition to this information, the Domesday folios for the city of Leicester say that Robert of Vessy ‘has three houses that belong to Kibworth Harcourt’, an interesting hint of the village’s links even before 1066 to the urban life of Leicester, which may have started in an arrangement made by which the countryside contributed to the maintenance of the borough in the tenth century.
Then comes the entry for Kibworth Beauchamp. The village was already split into two manors and listed first are the lands of Robert the Bursar, who had lands next door in Fleckney and Wistow:
In Kibworth [Beauchamp] there are 5 carucates and 6 bovates of land [around 700 acres]. Before 1066 there were 5 plough teams. 8 villagers [villeins] with 6 smallholders have 2 ploughs. There are 12 acres of meadow. Value was 10s per annum in 1066, now 30s. In 1066 Edwin Alferd [i.e. the son of Aelferth] held these lands freely with full jurisdiction.
A second manor in Beauchamp belonged to Robert ‘Hostiarius’ (a minor royal court official, in English the ‘door ward’):
Robert also holds 6 carucates of land [around 720 acres] in Kibworth. Before 1066 there were three plough teams. On the lord’s demesne land two and a half ploughs [i.e. teams], 3 slaves. 9 villagers with 2 smallholders have two and a half plough teams. Twelve acres of meadow. Value in 1066 was 30s, now 40s. [Before 1066] Aelmer [=Aelfmaer or Ailmaer] held these lands with full jurisdiction.
So in Kibworth Beauchamp there were around 1,400 acres of arable land and twenty-four acres of meadow. Before 1066 in total there were seventeen villagers (villeins) and their families with eight smallholders and three slaves.
Then comes Smeeton. Here the situation was more complicated. The village and its detached hamlet of Westerby were divided between four or five lords (a medieval estate lawyer’s heaven!). One of them was King William himself, an absentee landlord, but a landlord nonetheless. About 160 acres were still known in the eighteenth century as ‘the king’s share’ and in 1086 were farmed by four freemen with thirty acres each. These plots are still clearly visible on the early Ordnance Survey maps.
The main manor in Smeeton was a 500- or 600-acre estate which Hugh Grandmesnil leased to Robert de Bucy with two freemen, one villein and three smallholders. Robert the Bursar held a manor of another 360 acres, probably Westerby, which was farmed by three freemen, two villeins and one smallholder. Four freemen who belonged to a manor four miles away in Bruntingthorpe also farmed here.
In total in Smeeton Westerby there were about 1,100 acres of arable farmed in 1086 by twelve freemen and freewomen and their families along with three villein tenants and four smallholders. There were no slaves. ‘There was land enough for seven ox teams,’ the account concludes, ‘with nine acres of meadow and a wood three furlongs square.’ This was the only woodland in the whole parish, which gives an idea of how intensively Kibworth was already being farmed before 1066.
Such was Kibworth in 1086. Like a lot of Domesday the picture is complicated and the detail at first sight off-putting. But some revealing data can be adduced from the entries. First, the arable land under the plough in the parish in the eleventh century was about 4,000 acres, very close to the figure given by Victorian gazetteers. Norman Kibworth had only a small amount of meadow, and a very small amount of woodland, only the three square furlongs in Smeeton. With more than twenty plough teams in 1086 the old parish of Kibworth was already under very highly industrialized farming.
The image that emerges from the dry statistics of the Domesday text then is of an open landscape probably already devoid of hedges, perhaps with a few isolated trees and only one patch of woodland in Smeeton. The three main villages were each defined, nucleated settlements surrounded by their common fields, which were accessed from farm lanes or slangs along which the plough teams were led out from their yards. In Harcourt there was a row of houses and gardens along the ‘king’s highway’, a horse mill, a pond, a chapel, the ‘Haagate’, and the Slang, from which the field strips of the three great fields fanned out to the north. The church serving the whole parish stood on the hill between the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ village, where villeins and serfs lived along the road to Smeeton, with great yards for the barns and ox stalls on the lord’s demesne. Further to the south were the hamlets at Smeeton and Westerby with the largest number of freemen and freewomen. Each place was at the centre of its common fields, open and unhedged, worked by rows of plough teams under the wide Midland skies. This was already industrialized farming where the majority of society was geared to the production of food.
Class
What also emerges from Domesday is a vivid picture of the social classes. In this sense Kibworth is a perfect example of eleventh-century English society. In the three main settlements – the two Kibworths and Smeeton Westerby – there were already clearly defined distinctions in social status. Kibworth Beauchamp was populated by unfree people: seventeen villeins (tied peasants), eight bordars (cottagers) and three slaves. ‘Upper’ Kibworth (Harcourt) has ten villeins, six bordars and six slaves, but also six free tenant households. But in Smeeton, in addition to seven dependent peasant families, the dominant group are the families of the dozen freemen and freewomen. These are the distinctive class of East Midland sokemen, free peasants whose descendants we will trace through this story, down to the yeoman of the Tudor Age, whose class will be an important factor in the rise of English capitalism and in the development of English ideas about freedom.
So in the eleventh century all the free peasants in Kibworth were in Harcourt and Smeeton, and none in Beauchamp. This must reflect older patterns in the late-Saxon village, and maybe even earlier. As we have seen, Harcourt seems to have been the original centre in the eighth century, as ‘Cybba’s worth’. Beauchamp was perhaps a village of workers and dependent peasants. Smeeton on the other hand was an artisanal village, even before the ninth century, which later had a strong preponderance of freemen. The Viking conquest may well have fossilized these divisions, preserving older forms of freedom lost in the south. Merton College’s purchase of Harcourt in the 1270s may have helped fix this too, making Harcourt a ‘closed village’ and leaving Beauchamp a workers’ place, giving the two halves their proverbially distinctive character described in later accounts and still remarked on by older villagers today – and not always in jest.
The total community in 1086 numbered maybe fifteen freemen and freewomen and their families and dependants, thirty villeins, eighteen bordars and nine slaves, men and women; not forgetting the Frenchman! Allowing for five persons per family, this might give a total of between 350 and 400 people all told: a sizeable place when we consider the later population of the parish, which was only 1,200 in 1801 and nearly 2,000 in the 1871 census. So Kibworth was one of the most populous villages in the hundred of Gartree from as far back as the eleventh century – as it is today; with its new housing estates, with over 4,000 people in Beauchamp and 1,000 in Harcourt it is well on the way to becoming a small town.
Medieval apartheid: life under the Normans
The villagers now lived under the close supervision of their lord’s agents, who were backed by armed force. The Norman landlords had bailiffs on site with armed men. It is not certain whether any of the local Anglo-Saxon landlords survived. They may have been killed or not but they were certainly dispossessed, unless like one former freeman recorded in Domesday they now rented their own land from the Normans graviter et miserabiliter, ‘with a heavy heart and in misery’. The numbers of the Norman occupiers who ruled a nation of 2 million people were probably only ever in the low tens of thousands. Even 50,000 newcomers over the next three decades would amount to a mere 2.5 per cent of the English population – and that is probably a maximum. It had been a classic single-event conquest and it was followed by an unparalleled redistribution of wealth among the alien aristocracy. In 1086 the Domesday folios show that over 50 per cent of landed wealth was now in the hands of 175 lay tenants in chief. Only two of 1,400 tenants of the thegnly class were Anglo-Saxon, and nearly half of the nation’s wealth was held by just eleven men – one of whom was the chief landowner in the village, Hugh Grandmesnil.
Among the lower classes in England as a whole, two thirds of the population were unfree peasants and 10 per cent were slaves. For them life now became harder still. The Norman occupation was remembered as a bitter time for the free peasantry too, who in many parts of the country lost their lands and customary rights. For centuries the English people handed down a myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’: a folk tradition that 1066 was a brutal and disruptive break in the continuity of English society. This myth was quarried by the radicals in the English Civil War, and has been revived time and again in books and films: ‘Norman saw on English oak’, as Walter Scott famously put it in Ivanhoe: ‘On English neck a Norman yoke. Norman spoon in English dish / and England ruled as Normans wish.’ But to an extent this is not a myth. ‘At first they raged at each other … and the Normans took savage measures in response,’ wrote Richard FitzNeal a century on from the Conquest, though he believed that by then things had got better: ‘But during the time that the English and Normans have now dwelt together, and mutually married and given in marriage, the nations have now become so intermingled that one can hardly tell today who is English and who is Norman.’ FitzNeal was speaking only of freemen and admits it was a different matter for the working class, ‘the bondmen who are called villani’, who he suggests were still a race apart as far as the Normans were concerned. But even for the English upper classes it turns out FitzNeal’s view was somewhat rose-tinted. New studies of marriage in the Norman period suggest that there was almost no intermarriage for at least three generations. In that first century the villagers lived under a kind of apartheid. Their rulers spoke French, didn’t teach English to their children, and viewed the English as an inferior race. Change, however, did come – even in Kibworth – and it came comparatively swiftly from the middle of the twelfth century.
To the Norman overlords the villages of the Midland ‘champain’ lands were first and foremost profitable real estate. In the early twelfth century the ‘upper’ village of Kibworth was bought by the Harcourt family (Harcourt is an attractive village in Normandy with a fine castle); and ‘lower’ Kibworth was taken by the Beauchamps, who were royal butlers, later the Earls of Warwick, from the Grandmesnils. It was these families who gave the villages the suffixes that they still have today. The new lords were Norman and Angevin upper crust, and under them, a century after the Conquest, the social barriers start to break down between conquerors and conquered.
When they do, local East Midland leases begin to give us the stories at grass-roots level. For example Christiana, the daughter of a sokeman, marries a well-to-do local Norman with the blessing of her feudal lord. Though her name is fashionably Norman, her ancestors were of Viking descent for she names her father as Ivo, her grandfather as Swein and her great-grandfather as Magnus (who could have been alive in 1086). Another local girl, with the very Norman name of Asceria, ‘the daughter of Joslan’, seals a Latin charter with a bequest for the souls of her antecessors – Arngrim, her Viking grandfather, and Wulfgifu, her English great-grandmother.
Similar stories are hinted at by our fragmentary sources for Kibworth itself. A Kibworth woman, Matilda, in the 1260s and 1270s, was the daughter of Ivo, granddaughter of Heinricus and great-granddaughter of Ivo: all Scandinavian names. Matilda married a local landholder, Richard of Saddington, a member of the local elite, and gave her son a good Norman name, Robert. Such stories are examples of how free peasants could move up in the world – albeit it took Christiana, Asceria and Matilda’s families four generations after Hastings to do it.
The open fields
For all but a few of the villagers, daily life was still devoted to working the land. The whole effort of the community was directed towards producing food. And in the twelfth century this meant open-field farming. This system of communally farmed agriculture spread over much of north-west Europe in the Middle Ages, and was not just an English phenomenon. But it was particularly intensively developed in post-Conquest England, in a great swathe up the middle of lowland Britain from Sussex to the Scottish lowlands. As we saw previously, in England open fields were developed, probably in the tenth century, as a way of organizing town and countryside in an age of war. In some areas pushed through by powerful kings and lords, its adoption must have felt as draconian as the Ministry of Agriculture’s ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign of 1939–45. After the Conquest the system was expanded by local lords as the population grew from maybe 2 million in 1086 to 6–7 million 200 years later. The gradual clearance of new land to feed the rising population can be seen on the ground in Kibworth Beauchamp, where two or three hundred acres of new land were opened up under acute population pressure between the Hundred Rolls survey of 1279 and a village Extent of 1305.
Each of the two Kibworths and Smeeton had three fields; and the holdings of the peasants free and unfree were scattered among the fields so that everyone got a share of good and bad land, light and ‘strong’ soil. The Kibworth documents in the archive of Merton College give a vivid picture of the complexities of the system. For example, a lease from the 1260s records the gift of one of the Harcourt family to ‘Robert son of Richard the Parson’ of half a virgate (fifteen acres) in Kibworth held by Robert son of Matilda, and of a further eight acres in Kibworth. Robert’s eight acres, scattered through the three great fields, are described in this way by Sylvester, the village clerk (a rood here is a quarter of an acre):
One acre on ‘Litlehul’ near the land that Roger Wythe held
One and a half roods that lie under Blacklands near the land held by Yvo son of Henry
One and a half roods that lie on Blacklands next to the land held by Reginald ‘at the Well’
Half an acre that lies in Crowenersike by the strip held by Alexander son of Robert
One rood upon Reyland next to the land Robert Joye holds
Three roods at ‘Walwrtes’ next to the land held by Hugh Hurtlebole
One acre lies under Peascrofte
One and a half roods upon Peascrofte near the land held by Robert Joye
One and a half roods under Northul [North hill] near the strip held by Reginald atte Welle
Half an acre on Stalegate near Robert Brun’s land
Three roods on Pesilsike near Reginald atte Welle’s land
One acre extending into Borettesdale near the land of Roger Wythe
One acre that extends into Pesilsike near the land held by Nicholas son of Simon the reeve.
Describing just eight acres in Harcourt fields, this is the kind of minute accounting in which the village reeves specialized. Remarkably, some of the field names – Blacklands and Peashill sike, for example – can still be traced on the ground through later tithe maps. What astonishes is the sheer (to us) mind-numbing amount of semi-intellectual effort that would be needed to remember it all. A thirty-acre villein holding a spread between the three great fields could have as much as seventy or eighty strips scattered in more than twenty separate blocks across the open lands, and each of the individual furlongs could have its own name! And this document doesn’t begin to outline the custom and dues attached to such a smallholding. On which, take this (from the late thirteenth century) for a sample account of the labour dues of a thirty-acre Kibworth villein:
For a full virgate you must do two days ploughing without food ration, bringing your own plough; two days harrowing and hoeing, food provided; two days mowing on the lord’s meadow with an extra man whom you provide; gathering and carrying the lord’s hay in his cart with no food … Six days autumn reaping with extra men as specified; carrying the lord’s share of the corn to Leicester market on your own horse and anywhere else but only within the shire; gathering straw for roofing and repairs on the lord’s demesne farm. It is the custom for the men of the village to mow the lord’s meadow with one shilling and sixpence worth of beer while they do it. The virgate also owes death duty of second-best beast to the lord and the best beast to the Church as mortuary.
(The additional marriage fines, paid when a peasant asked the lord’s permission for his daughter to marry, are too faded on the manuscript to read.)
Such was the life of a villein in the thirteenth-century village at the time when the open fields reached their developed form. But even as that farming life emerges into the full light of the documents, it was already changing under the impact of individualism, and indeed of common sense and convenience as a cumbersome system struggled to keep up food production as demand outstripped supply. Already strips were being amalgamated by ambitious peasant proprietors, and freeholders were letting out parts of their holdings to the large number of young people who had no land of their own. But it remained the case that the great fields in each of the villages dominated the working life, custom, language and life cycle of the villagers for the next 500 years.
The farming year in the open fields
How the whole system worked, with the three-year cycle of rotation of crops, is best seen in Kibworth Harcourt where a mass of early manorial documents survive in the archive of Merton College, which became the landlord in around 1270. Some customs were particular to the area, but the general principles can be applied to all villages of the open-field system from Northumberland to Devon. The operation of the open-field arable was carefully regulated and can be seen in detail in about 300 villages across the country which have surviving sets of manorial rolls. Of these Kibworth has one of the fullest sets.
We know it as the three-field system, but a village could have two fields, four, five, six or even more. The classic type though is three fields. Crops were sown on a three-course rotation. In any year one field would have a winter-sown wheat crop, a second would have a spring-sown crop such as barley or peas, and the third would be left fallow so that ‘the land could be rested’ allowing nutrients to recover the fertility of the field. Its grass and weeds were left as grazing for sheep.
The rotation of crops on the three fields of Harcourt went over a three-year cycle. In the first year the West or Carr Field had winter-sown wheat; the North Field, the spring-sown crops; and the East or Howe Field would be left fallow. Then in the second year West Field is fallow and North switches to winter-sown wheat, while Howe Field has the spring-sown crops. In the third year West has spring crops, North is fallow and Howe has the winter wheat. The whole system depended on the intense cooperation of the community: ‘You don’t have to like each other’, as a modern strip farmer puts it, ‘but you have to work together.’
No detailed account of Kibworth custom has survived. Most of it of course was in the heads of the reeves and the tenants and was passed down orally. But following the farming year from one harvest to the next we can see how it worked in practice. What follows shows the customary use of the one surviving open-field village in the East Midlands, at Laxton, where the strips were still hand-ploughed with horses in the 1940s. From the court books at Kibworth we can see that a calendar like this was followed till the Enclosure Act of 1779. This was all no doubt second nature to Simon the reeve, Harry the Hayward and their neighbours, and there was no reason to write it down:
Midsummer – late June: haymaking; the first hay from the meadowlands is cut and brought into the barns. Midsummer is celebrated by a great bonfire on the eve of John the Baptist (24 June).
6 July: all animals to be cleared from the sykes or siks – the grassy baulks between the ridges.
10 July–1 August: hoeing of the sykes.
1/2 August – Lammas: haymaking in the meadows is completed and the meadows are opened for grazing. Lammas is the celebration of the first wheat harvest – the ‘loaf mass’, the feast of first fruits. In later times all the women and children in the village customarily helped in haymaking, as can be seen in photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
August: farmers begin the harvest of winter wheat, the field of winter corn in Carr Field.
End of August: with the harvest finished, the winter cornfield is ‘broken’. The villagers’ stock is allowed to graze the stubbles. The beginning of the harvest of spring corn in North Field.
15 October: the spring cornfield is broken: sheep and other stock are moved from Carr Field to graze on the stubbles.
Mid-October/early November: the farmers move to the fallow field (Howe), which will be next year’s wheatfield. This is ploughed, harrowed and sown with winter corn.
1 November (All Souls Day): the meadows are closed for grazing. Festival.
Mid-November: unless very wet, all ploughing and sowing should be completed.
23 November (Laxton custom): all animals to leave the open fields except twenty sheep per freeman/customary tenant on the fallow field. Slaughter of those animals needed for winter.
Late November – Jury Day: twelve jurymen are appointed for the next year’s cycle, plus the field foreman. They go out to the new wheatfield (North Field this year), which is inspected on foot and all dykes and individual strip boundaries are checked and if necessary re-staked.
Early December: the Court leet is held, under two officials, the reeve, representing the lord of the manor, and the bailiff. Fines are paid, new tenants sworn in. They appoint various officials, including the hayward and the pinder (who rounds up stray cattle – the Kibworth pinfold was on Main Street near the horse mill at the end of the Slang).
November/December: preparation of the new spring cornfield for planting in the following spring.
21 December – Midwinter: Christmas holiday until Epiphany; the peasants had nearly seven weeks’ holiday over the year.
6 January (or the first Monday after): end of the Christmas holiday. Plough Monday was a strong custom in the East Midlands, perhaps of Danelaw origin, when a plough was decorated and taken round by the men in the hope that ‘gode spede wel the plow.’ This tradition still took place in Kibworth up till the 1930s.
March: the spring cornfield is ploughed and sown.
April: when the young grass has appeared the stock is turned out on to the sykes and closes.
Easter holiday: the celebration of the Resurrection is one of the biggest feasts of the village year.
April: lambing, calving, farrowing of sows, threshing – Kibworth had specialist threshers in the thirteenth century.
Late June: haymaking commences in the meadows. Letting off of the gaits and commons by auction (for the syke grass). With that, from harvest to harvest the cycle of one year is complete. With dancing, singing and a great deal of beer brewed by the village brewsters, the Midsummer bonfire on the eve of John the Baptist.
These tasks of course presuppose many specialist jobs, though all the villagers worked the fields. They elected the field officials from among themselves – the hayward and woodward, the reeves and constables. These were mainly men’s jobs though women, as we shall see, could plough and work in the fields helping their menfolk, or even as tenants on their own helped by their children, kinsmen and neighbours, or using seasonal hired labour. Women work as brewsters and traders, and have even been found as reeves and jury members. Specialist jobs in the village are not recorded yet, though a village the size of Kibworth could not have done without a carpenter, a miller, a smith, a cobbler and a baker. This all presupposes literacy too, and in the 1160s we first pick up a village scribe, and one thirteenth-century witness list on a Kibworth document even mentions an apotecarius. These are the first signs then that the village was beginning to diversify, a process that begins in the late twelfth century in the English Midlands and which we will find revealed in Kibworth when documents come thick and fast from the 1260s on.
‘Christ and his saints slept’
These were still very harsh times. A bleak scene recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1124 serves to remind us. Towards Christmas at Hound Hill, not far north of Kibworth, Ralph Basset (who among his wide estates owned 120 acres in Kibworth Beauchamp) hanged:
forty-six thieves, all at one time, and six of them were blinded and castrated first. And truthful persons said that many of those died very injustly there. But our Lord God Almighty, from whom no secrets are hid, He sees the poor oppressed by every kind of injustice, first deprived of their property, and then of their lives. A very bitter year was this. He who had money had it stolen by violent exactions or corrupt courts; he who had none starved to death.
A letter of the time describes the brutal tactics of William de Beauchamp (who owned part of Kibworth):
He illegally seizes corn, and steals money to pay his retinue. Besides this we have for a long time been forced to give 3s each month for the needs of his servants, and at each season of the year we have been compelled to plough, sow, and then reap sixty acres of his land. And on top of this, our peasants have been burdened with daily services and innumerable works, and he has not ceased to pursue and afflict them to the depths of misery.
To make matters worse, between the 1130s and 1150s England was racked by Civil War and the Kibworth region suffered further devastations. ‘More than we can say,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘we suffered nineteen winters for our sins when Christ and his saints slept.’ Grim times for peasantry. Yet paradoxically this was a time of progressive growth as the centre of gravity of the European economy began to shift to the countries of the western seaboard.
Boom time
Between 1066 and 1300 England boomed. The population more than doubled in Kibworth and Smeeton from around 300 in 1086 to some 800 two centuries later. It was a time when middling peasant households got more possessions and furniture and there was more variety on a peasant table. New towns were founded across the country in the twelfth century and markets were licensed everywhere. Around this time Market Harborough becomes the alternative local market for Kibworth, as the road we now know as the A6 replaces the old Roman road, the Gartree road, as the main route from Leicester to Harborough and London. Then in 1223 the market came to Kibworth. On 12 March King Henry III granted to ‘my faithful and trusted William de Beauchamp a weekly market on Wednesdays so long as it is not a nuisance to the neighbouring merchants’. The market stalls stood around the open space now called the Bank: they sold meat and fish, tools, clothes, leather goods, shoes, cloth and perhaps even luxuries such as spices. The profits from the market in the form of the fees from the stallholders went to the lord, whose family were courtiers and royal butlers.
The arrival of a market suggests that Kibworth was already a village with some crafts – smiths, weavers, dyers and cloth workers – along with the usual service workers found in most villages. And around this time in the Leicester Borough and guild records, we start to pick up members of the village moving away to Leicester to make their fortunes. In those days not everyone could move of course. Villeins needed permission from the lord and were unlikely to get it. Freemen though, especially if they had a craft or trade, might establish a connection between the village and the town, especially if they had kinsmen in both. One of the earliest records, of 1 June 1199, involves a local man, Roger of Kibworth, who along with a parmunter (who prepared leather for clothing) was entered into the merchants’ guild in Leicester after the coronation of King John. He would be the first of many.
These gradual changes in peasant society in the twelfth century are signified by the first record of a village scribe, in the 1160s. He was needed because even free peasant members of the village community who owned a few acres were documenting land and property grants they had made in perpetuity, written by the village clerk, sometimes even as gifts to the neighbouring church. Peasants are now seen as competent to found village churches and chapels (there was one in each of Harcourt, Beauchamp and Smeeton in the Middle Ages) and peasant families like the Sibils and Polles begin to provide chaplains as well as reeves and jurymen. Among the peasants found acting as witnesses to grants at this time there are also many women. In one local grant from around 1160 five freewomen (only one of whom is married) make a grant of land to their church. The long witness list names priests and landowners but also includes women of the village community, sixteen of whom are variously described as mothers, sisters, daughters, widows, wives and unmarried girls. A few years later next door to Kibworth in Carlton Curlieu, Eilieva – the wife of Robert the cook – sealed a ‘cirograph’ as her health failed, giving a fur cloak, a cap, a gold ring, eight pigs, eleven oxen and nineteen sheep to the women of a nearby nunnery, on condition that ‘if she recover from her illness they will receive her as a nun when she wishes to renounce the world.’ St Guthlac’s sister had been a royal woman, Eilieva was the wife of a cook. Times were changing.
Englishness rising
By the early 1200s the English people could reflect on the Norman Conquest with some measure of tranquillity. Even among writers of mixed descent those events had been ‘a terrible havoc of our most dear country’; for Henry of Huntingdon ‘the Normans were the last of five plagues sent to Britain, who still hold the English in subjection.’ But the feeling did not go away that the English ruling class was an alien and rapacious group still divided by language from their subjects. ‘The Normans could speak nothing but their own language,’ wrote one thirteenth-century observer:
and they spoke French as they did at home and also taught their children. So that the upper class of the country that is descended from them stick to the language they got from home: therefore unless a person knows French he is little thought of – but the lower class stick to English and their own language even now.
Others, with the passage of time, were able to take a historical perspective on what they saw as the enslavement of the people brought about by William and his followers ‘who have held the English in subjection ever since’. Among some of these writers the whole social structure of the feudal system with its gradations of freedom and unfreedom now came to be seen as a consequence of the Conquest: ‘For all this thralldom that now on England is through Normans it came, bondage and distress.’
In the thirteenth century the rise of this sensibility will become apparent even at the village level: proletarian, vernacular, nationalist, speaking up for England and the English language, and backed up by a historical view of the English past. All this will feed into the momentous events of the century, from Magna Carta to the rebellion of Simon de Montfort. For trickling down through the shire and hundred assemblies these political ideas will reach the peasantry, who even in a place like Kibworth will play their part in the making of English history.