CHAPTER 2
So long as the guardian has the wardship of the land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, preserves, fishponds, mills and other things, and keep his land stocked with ploughs and wainage such as the agricultural season demands.
Magna Carta, Clause 5
In 1215 nine-tenths of the population of England lived in the countryside. Most families lived and worked on small farms, as they had since time immemorial. Nearly all kept animals and grew crops, especially the grain for making their daily bread and ale. Regional differences in soil and climate meant that the precise balance between arable and pastoral was infinitely varied. Summers then were on average 1°C warmer than they are now, winters were milder and rainfall lower. The warmer climate meant that vineyards were planted as far north as Ely, and crops were grown higher up hills and mountainsides than is usual today.
If there was such a thing as a typical family farm, it was between ten and thirty acres in size, with husband, wife and three children. Since records show that better-off farmers had on average more children than the poor, birth control of sorts was practised, probably coitus interruptus. The study of excavated bones shows that people grew to a healthy size: the average adult male was five foot seven tall and had good teeth. A farmer with ten acres was able to produce enough to feed his family, pay rent to his lord, taxes to the king, and tithes to the Church and still have a surplus to sell at market to buy pottery, iron tools, ornaments and ale. In every village several women brewed and sold ale. It was those who farmed less than five acres, or who had no land at all, who suffered when the harvest was poor, when grain prices soared and their wages as labourers or craftsmen no longer sufficed. Faced with starvation they turned to acorns, once the poison had been leached out of them, and to weeds as famine foods. Fortunately in John’s reign, there was only one year, 1203, when the harvest failed.
The typical family lived in a two-roomed timber-framed house standing within a plot of land, known as a croft, of up to an acre in extent. There was plenty of room for a vegetable and fruit garden as well as outbuildings for poultry and other livestock, all surrounded by a bank and a ditch. The house had a thatched roof, clay floors, and clay or wattle and daub walls, windows with shutters, and an open hearth in the larger room.
By modern standards farm animals were small. Sheep were about the size of the modern-day Welsh-mountain sheep, and cattle weighed only half as much as their modern equivalents. But most male farm animals were castrated so that they put on weight. Castrated bullocks, known as oxen, could pull the heaviest carts; castrated rams, known as wethers, produced the heaviest fleeces; castrated cockerels, capons, were fattened for the table, and so were castrated boars. Cattle and sheep provided meat, milk, leather, wool, tallow for candles and manure for fields, as well as vellum and parchment for writing. Poultry gave meat, eggs, feathers and quills. Preserved foods such as bacon, sausages and cheese were especially useful. Bees were kept for honey, and horses as well as oxen for pulling carts and ploughs. Woodland provided fuel and building materials, as well as acorns and beech mast, the seeds of the beech on the ground, to feed pigs, animals which could convert virtually anything into meat for humans. Even dry leaves were rolled up and made into faggots for the fire at home. In areas where woods were few and far between, peat provided fuel. In Norfolk peat was dug on such a scale that the resulting pits created the inland lakes known as the Norfolk Broads. These farmers wasted nothing. Even their own excrement was recycled as manure.
Arable farming was a methodical process, painfully slow to our eyes. While a modern tractor might take a day to plough twenty acres, in 1215 this would have taken forty days. Farmers sowed by hand, scattering seed as they walked their fields. To frighten off birds, dead crows – scarecrows – were hung over newly sown fields. Modern organic farming has returned to some of the practices of those days – weeding by hand, for instance. Rotation helped to eradicate crop-specific weeds, and traditionally farmers followed a three-course rotation:
1. Winter-sown crops, such as wheat and rye. Cereal crops grew taller than they do today. In the absence of agro-chemicals, the seed was tightly encased in chaff, which protected it against rust, fungi and birds.
2. Spring-sown crops such as barley and, oats and legumes such as peas and beans. Human and animal dung recycled soil nitrogen, but legumes added new nitrogen to the soil by converting atmospheric nitrogen, and subsequent cereal crops did better as a result. The science of this was not understood until the late nineteenth century, but experienced farmers were well aware of the importance of legumes in keeping the land ‘in good heart’.
3. Fallow. This was turned over to grazing animals, so that it had been both rested and manured before it was next cultivated. By keeping sheep in folds overnight, farmers could exercise some control over the manuring process.
Traditionally harvest started on 1 August, the festival of Lammas, which took its name from the church service of ‘loaf mass’ when loaves made with the first ripe corn of the year were consecrated. Harvesting was done by hand with a sickle, and usually lasted well into September. But harvesting handful by handful, though desperately slow, had one advantage. It allowed farmers to mix two crops – for example the mixture of wheat and rye known as maslin – on the grounds that even if the weather meant that one cereal did badly, the other might do better. With the advent of mechanised harvesting, this kind of insurance against harvest failure was no longer possible. Once harvested, the stooks were bound up and carted off to the barns, while gleaners moved on to the fields. Some spikelets of grain were set aside for next year’s seed; the rest were threshed, winnowed to separate the grain from the chaff, then ground and used to make porridge or bread.
Woods too were farmed in rotation by a system known as coppicing: trees were cut back to produce new growth. By cutting to a number of differently timed cycles, for example, every five, ten or fifteen years, coppicing produced a constant supply of wood of different thicknesses.
These farming practices were age-old, based on the trial and error of countless generations. But it would be wrong to think of the English countryside as an unchanging world in which time stood still. Over much of England and eastern Scotland the landscape itself had been recently transformed. What we tend now to think of as the archetypal English landscape, a countryside of villages and market towns – the England of the Archers, of Ambridge and Borchester – is a recent creation. Throughout Britain and Ireland the truly ancient human landscape was one of hamlets and isolated homesteads, with very few towns, most of those ports, and no villages. By 1215 that had changed. Over large parts of Britain the previous two or three centuries had witnessed farmers abandoning the dispersed settlement pattern in which they and their predecessors had lived for millennia. Instead they now huddled together in villages. In some villages each house stood in a plot identical in size and shape to its neighbours, and all in a neat row along a street or around the village green. Such uniformity betrays the hand of the planner. Someone compelled people to move and that, presumably, was the lord of the manor, for there is no doubt that most of these new group settlements were associated with a manor house and a church, itself paid for by the lord’s family. However, some villages reveal a more higgledy-piggledy layout, and here the move to a single centre was probably the outcome of many individual decisions taken over a prolonged period. What forces persuaded these farmers to leave their homesteads in favour of the new-fangled settlement pattern?
The village can be seen as a rational response to population growth. In 1086, when the Domesday survey was made, the population of England was probably about 2.25 million. By 1215 it had risen to somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million. The population continued to grow, reaching 6 million or so by 1300, when England was as densely populated as it would be in the eighteenth century. One response to population growth was to expand cultivation. Large areas of forest, fen, marsh and upland were cleared, drained and farmed. Some of it was potentially good soil, as in the rich silt belt around the Wash. The monks of Glastonbury reclaimed thousands of acres in the Somerset Levels, creating high-quality meadow by building dykes and diverting river courses. But there was a limit to the physical expansion of cultivation. The Domesday Book shows that seven or eight million acres were already under the plough in 1086 – almost as many as in the 1950s. By 1215 some farmers, such as those who made clearings in the Sussex Weald, were struggling to make the best of soil that would always remain poor.
An alternative to expansion was greater efficiency. By living together in a village community, farmers could co-operate more effectively. In conjunction with his neighbours, the farmer who owned only two oxen was able to take advantage of the most up-to-date farm machinery, the heavy plough drawn by eight oxen. Because heavy ploughs were much harder to turn than the old-fashioned scratch plough, it made sense for the land they worked to be divided into long narrow strips so that ploughs were turned as infrequently as possible. Each householder held many strips scattered throughout the two large fields attached to each village. By this method good and bad soil was shared out fairly, and all lived more or less equidistant from their work. Also, in this way the risks were spread.
This co-operative system meant that working the land had to be regulated by rules common to all. Manorial courts undoubtedly helped the lord of the manor to control and take profits from his tenants, but they also settled disputes between villagers and issued by-laws on matters of common concern, such as the use or abuse of grazing rights on common land. A relatively rich farmer, for example, had to be prevented from grazing too many animals on the common. Each year one common field lay fallow, while the other grew winter and spring-sown crops. Any change in the balance between arable and fallow required the village to reach a consensus. Thus, economic rationality created a real village community – though not everywhere in Britain. East Anglia and Kent were two of the most densely settled parts of England, yet in both regions villages remained rare. Here homesteads straggled along the edges of common land, presumably to prevent good arable land from being wasted by being built on. Throughout the west of Britain too, where pastoral farming remained more important than arable, people continued to live and work in the ancient – and more independent – fashion.
The existence of planned villages demonstrates the capacity of lords to assess the economic situation and calculate the levels of investment needed to make radical innovations. In this climate of financial rationality, it was possible to reckon that using slave labour was not cost-effective and should be abandoned. Slavery in Britain had not disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. On the contrary it was still flourishing when William I conquered England in 1066. As in Roman times much of the hardest work was done by slaves: ploughing by male slaves, grinding corn with hand mills by slave women. In a slave-owning society, such as Anglo-Saxon England, a master who killed his own slave was guilty of a sin, but not of a crime. Slaves were bought and sold at market – human flexibility meant that one healthy male might cost as much as a plough team of eight oxen. Captured slaves were among the most desirable profits of war. But William I came from Normandy, where slavery was already a thing of the past, and he disapproved. He put an end to the slave trade. Gradually slaves became more expensive to acquire. For centuries an occasional rich lord on his deathbed had been moved to free slaves as an act of Christian piety, but now – at long last – traditional notions of charity went hand in hand with the profit motive. In return for burdensome, often full-time services as ploughmen and shepherds, slaves were freed and given small tenements. By the 1120s Englishmen looked upon slavery as a barbarous custom happily no longer practised in their modern and civilised society. A hundred years before Magna Carta granted rights to freemen, an even more fundamental kind of freedom had been established.
The lords of the Magna Carta generation were able, however, to win a victory in the law courts whose effect was to create serfdom – a condition which many have believed to be just a new kind of slavery. Economic and social circumstance inevitably meant that some people were much less free than others. Those tenants who owed rent in the form of long hours of work on their landlord’s estates had little freedom of choice about how they spent their days. A tenant who was not allowed to leave his holding or give his daughter in marriage without his lord’s permission – a permission for which he had to pay – felt a frustrating lack of freedom. Such tenant farmers were significantly less free than those who owed cash rents and could earn their money as they chose. Some tenants were prosperous farmers; others were churls or peasants. It had always been part of the morality of kingship that the king and his courts would protect freemen against unjustified oppression – but never to the extent that they would help ‘peasants’ loosen the ties that bound them to their lords. So, the king’s judges formulated a new set of rules whose effect was to disbar half the population of England from access to the public courts. Those tenants who owed the heaviest services to their lords were told that they did not have the right to have their disputes heard in the royal courts as freemen did. In this sense they were unfree, and legally classified as serfs or villeins; and so were their children and their children’s children. From now on their disputes, whether with each other or with their lords, could only be heard in the manorial courts – the lords’ own courts.
Records kept by these courts, the court rolls, survive from the late thirteenth century onwards. There is no doubt that this arrangement suited the landlords. ‘The churl should always be well plucked for he is like a willow that sprouts better the more often it is pollarded.’ Even so, in law there were limits to the oppression of serfs by their lords. No lord was legally entitled to kill or mutilate his serf, as owners could their slaves. Although a serf and his family were in effect bought and sold when the land on which he lived, his villein tenancy, was bought and sold, no individual serf was separated from his or her family and taken to market to be sold in the way that slaves – human cattle – had been. Serfs were not slaves. But they felt unfree, and with reason. A long struggle lay ahead, in which the great rebellion of 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt, was the principal landmark, before serfdom was at last ended, although it has never been formally abolished.
Meanwhile, the England of 1215 was undergoing a managerial revolution. For many generations past the magnates, those who owned many manors, had lived off the rents and services owed them by their tenants. Their richer tenants, men of gentry status, would take over a whole manor or even several manors. Leases at rents fixed for a term of several lifetimes were common, and tended to turn into hereditary tenures. From the magnate’s point of view this had its advantages. It gave him a predictable income and kept administration costs to a minimum. There was no need for anyone to keep detailed records. This absence of records is why it is virtually impossible to write an economic history of the early English countryside.
What would happen to wealthy landlords who spent far more than they could afford and got into debt? The story of Samson, abbot of Bury St Edmunds from 1182 to 1211, as told by one of his monks, Jocelin of Brakelond, is revealing. Samson’s predecessor, Abbot Hugh,
was a good and devout monk but he lacked ability in business matters. For all his financial problems he only had one remedy: to borrow money, so that he could at least maintain the dignity of his household. Every year during the last eight years of his life further loans were taken out to pay the growing interest. Silk copes, gold vessels and other church vessels were pawned to both Christian and Jewish money lenders.
This was the situation that faced the new abbot immediately after his election. How could the monks climb out of the vicious cycle of escalating debt? Was it possible to run their estates more profitably? Could they re-negotiate the leases? Was demand for foodstuffs increasing as the population rose? Jocelin describes a first step in the process, one in which he himself was involved.
There is an English tradition by which every year on the day of Our Lord’s Circumcision (1 January), the abbot, as lord, is presented with gifts by a great many people. So I, Jocelin, thought carefully about what I would give him. Then I began to write down the names of all the churches which belong to the abbot, and I added estimates of the rents at which they could be leased, assuming an average price for grain.
If prices were increasing, then would they not do better if they took their manors into their own hands, instead of leasing them out, appointed bailiffs and reeves to run them, then sold the surplus on the open market? This, at any rate, was what Abbot Samson did during the 1180s and 1190s, and so did a few other of the more enterprising and efficient lords.
Then, early in King John’s reign, prices rose sharply, doubling or even trebling in the first five years of the new century. An ox, which could be bought for forty pence in the early 1190s, now cost eighty pence. The sudden and, to all appearances, unprecedented rise in the cost of living at the beginning of the century meant that great landowners would have found it impossible to maintain the style to which they were accustomed unless they followed Samson’s example and revolutionised the methods by which they managed their estates. And this was what they did. Many lords encountered fierce opposition from their tenants when they re-negotiated leases which fell in, and even fiercer when they tried to cancel them. Jocelin recounts one such case:
On the death of Robert of Cockfield, his son Adam came to the abbot, and asked that he should have the half hundred of Cosford for an annual payment of £5, saying that his father and grandfather had held it for more than 80 years. Adam came accompanied by his kindred, by Earl Roger Bigod, and by many other important people.
But Abbot Samson resisted this pressure from the local bigwigs, and explained why in a lengthy speech. He was, after all, a famous preacher able to give sermons in Latin, French and English, including Norfolk dialect. The local establishment then offered him a large sum of money to renew the lease of Cosford, but Samson still refused. It required determination (and often forensic skill in the law courts) to resist the pressure and prudent thought for the future to say no to the presents they tried to give him. But gradually, both at Bury St Edmunds and on other estates, the new measures were pushed through.
The rich could now get richer, but the new system was far from being problem free. From now on the lord’s expenses and profits were bound to vary from year to year. This made it easy for his officials to cheat him unless a close check was kept on their activities, so on each manor a detailed record of the year was kept, then checked together with similar returns from the other manors by auditors who represented the central administration of a great estate. The earliest such records to survive were drawn up from 1208 on the instructions of the bishop of Winchester, King John’s good friend Peter des Roches. As one satirist of the time put it, the bishop was ‘slack at scripture, sharp at accounting’. Other estates followed the practice of the businesslike bishop. The survival of masses of these accounts dating from around 1250 to 1400 means that historians know a great deal about the economy of the great estates during that century and a half.
Thirteenth-century auditors had a policy-making as well as a fraud-detecting role. They often noted that those who owed labour services worked without enthusiasm and suggested it might be better to hire wage labourers. In the summer everyone was expected to help with the lord’s harvest, but he had to lay on a generous feast to mark the occasion. Was it worth it? the auditors asked. They fixed targets for each manor, and took investment decisions, whether to replace equipment, for instance, or build new barns. The barley barn built at Temple Cressing in Essex around 1230 is still in use today. The landlords’ solution to the crisis of inflation meant that to run their estates they now required a whole army of professional treasurers, auditors, bailiffs, receivers and their clerks. Such people needed to learn their trade, and by the early thirteenth century there was a school of business administration at Oxford.
Yet the managerial revolution did little, perhaps nothing, to raise crop yields. By modern standards they remained very low indeed. The earliest surviving manorial accounts show that most lords were content to let a half or a third of their arable land lie fallow, leaving their sheep to manure it, plough the rest with ox teams only once or twice before sowing, and then sow only two to four bushels of seed an acre. By these methods they achieved returns of just three or four times the amount sown – in contrast to modern yields of more than twenty times the amount sown. Since these records relate to the home farms – the demesnes, as they were then called – of the greatest estates in England, it was always assumed that the yields obtained by their tenants or other lesser landholders were even lower, in the belief that the wealthiest would have employed the most advanced agricultural techniques.
But recent research has questioned this assumption. It has discovered that in relatively densely populated regions such as parts of Norfolk more intensive methods were employed, and higher yields achieved. Instead of letting some of the arable land lie fallow, it was all, or virtually all, cultivated. Crops such as peas were grown in great quantity and used not only to add nitrogen to the soil but also as fodder for animals kept in stalls, whose manure was collected and then spread on the soil just before ploughing – much more efficient than relying on grazing animals, whose droppings were often washed away by rain. By ploughing more often, and by speeding it up – using horses instead of oxen to draw the ploughs – and by more frequent weeding, they could achieve over twenty bushels an acre, a yield entirely comparable with that obtained by Norfolk farmers in the eighteenth century.
The secret was evidently in the intensive use of labour: many hands at work weeding, stone-picking and spreading manure. For most wealthy landlords, however, as their auditors could have told them, there was no point in achieving higher yields if it meant higher labour costs. The low yields on their estates made good financial sense. Peasant farmers, however, were their own labour force, and could count on the unstinting help of their wives and children. Since approximately three-quarters of the arable land of England was occupied by tenant farmers of this kind, it looks as though over most of the country average yields were higher than those obtained on the demesnes of the well-recorded great estates.
In other ways, too, the resources of the countryside were exploited more intensively than before. By 1215 England was significantly more mechanised than it had been a hundred years earlier. The windmill was invented in the twelfth century. This bold and brilliant design involved the whole mill building being raised on a post so that it could be turned by means of a long tail-pole to keep the sails facing into the wind. The earliest known windmills were built along the south and east coasts of England. Farmers might choose to grind their own grain by hand at home, but increasingly they had the option of taking it to the mill. In the same century waterpower was used for the first time in the cloth-making process, to drive hammers in fulling mills. (Fulling was the process whereby woven cloth was pounded in troughs filled with water and fuller’s earth or alum to thicken and felt it. At the same time more and more watermills were being built or upgraded by use of vertical wheels which required cogs to transfer waterpower to the millstones in the mill. It was much more efficient than having a horizontal wheel lying in the water channel and turning the millstones directly, but it required investment both in machinery and in building ponds and weirs to ensure a flow of water sufficient to turn a vertical wheel. Mill owners now competed with each other for business, offering better rates or a faster service than their rivals. This was why Abbot Samson, having invested a tidy sum in building a windmill for his abbey, ‘boiled with fury and could hardly eat or speak’ when he heard that the dean, too, had built a windmill. The dean said he had built it on his own freehold property and the wind was free for anyone to use, but Abbot Samson compelled him to dismantle it.
Improvements in harness and vehicle design meant that horses became more and more useful. In the Roman world horses had rarely been used for pulling anything heavier than a light chariot, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries horses were increasingly used for ploughing and hauling loaded carts. Horse-drawn carts and ploughs could go at least half as fast again as those pulled by oxen. Although horses could not cope with such heavy loads as oxen, their speed meant that they could be used with more flexibility. To speed traffic on its way, hundreds of new bridges were built and old wooden bridges were replaced with stone. The bridge-building programme was important enough for it to require regulation in Magna Carta (Clause 23). It also meant that for the first time since Roman times the road traffic system had been significantly upgraded.
The old Roman roads had not been maintained for centuries, but where there were towns and villages to be served the ten thousand miles of the Roman network remained in use. Four ancient roads were regarded as the great highways of Britain: from east to west, the Icknield Way; from south to north, Ermine Street; from south-east (Dover) to north-west (Chester), Watling Street; and the longest of them all, Fosse Way running from Caithness in north Scotland to Totnes in Devon. The foundation of new towns such as Bristol, Coventry and Oxford from the late Saxon period onwards meant that many new cross-country roads came into existence.
A medieval road, unlike engineered and metalled Roman and modern roads, hardly existed as a physical object. It was a right of way leading from one town or village to another. If it was much used it became a clearly visible track across the countryside. If the track was obstructed or became impassable in wet weather, travellers still had a right of way. They were entitled to leave the track and move on, even if they trampled down crops in the adjoining fields. Roads like this needed very little maintenance, but most local communities recognised that it was in their own interests at least to ensure that they were passable. If they were dilatory, they might well find the king prodding them, especially if it concerned one of the four great highways for which the Crown had a special responsibility. Icknield Way and Watling Street crossed at Dunstable and in 1285 Edward I forcefully reminded the priory and townspeople of their ancient obligation:
We have learnt that the high roads going through your town are so damaged and pitted by the heavy traffic of carts that those using them are in constant danger of being badly injured. We therefore command you, each and every one of you according to your station and resources, to ensure that the roads are mended and the holes filled in as has been done in times past. Otherwise it will be necessary for us to move in and with a heavy hand.
The kings of England, accompanied by their households, a baggage train of ten to twenty carts and dozens of packhorses, were always on the move around the country, rarely stopping for more than two or three days in any one place. Their government, it as been said, was ‘a government of the roads and roadsides’. Unimpressive as they might seem to us, the roads of medieval England met the requirements of government as well as the demands of the market.