PART 3
11
Jean Birrell
Peasant farms were essentially family affairs – this was one of their defining features. Yet there were always times and circumstances when family labour alone was not enough, the family too small, for example, or the holding unusually large, or seasonal demands too great. Peasants then hired extra workers and it is these men and women, and relations between them and their employers, that are the subject of this chapter.
Although the existence of these workers is well known to medieval historians, they have been relatively little discussed. Harold Fox’s aside that the ‘prevalence of service in husbandry’ is ‘one of the most obscure features of rural history before the Black Death’ largely holds true.1 While servants as a category have recently received more attention, and a wide range of material has been fruitfully mined, the emphasis has been on urban and nonagricultural servants.2 This has largely reflected the nature of the available evidence. While farm workers on the demesnes of the great estates are amply documented thanks to the detailed annual accounts widely kept by the thirteenth century, no similar evidence survives for peasant farms; it seems unlikely any was compiled. These servants do not go wholly undocumented, of course, but they tend to make only fleeting appearances in records, and in ways that do not lend themselves to systematic analysis. Generalisation is difficult, and we have to accept the impossibility of producing more than a bare minimum of convincing statistics.
Nevertheless, given the importance and interest of the subject, it is worth posing questions of such material as we have. What follows makes no claim to be a comprehensive account; it will focus on the question of who the peasant employers and their employees were, on relations between these two groups, on how farm servants fitted in to individual households and wider village society and on how this changed in changing economic circumstances. Space does not permit a proper consideration of regional or estate differences, which would in any case be difficult given the state of our knowledge, though more could certainly be done.
The main sources for the years before the Black Death are manorial records, in particular court rolls and custumals, and, as these become sparser and less informative, the poll tax returns and employment legislation of the post-Black Death period. All these records have their problems for the historian, not least the risk of documentary illusion, as these very different types of record shed a different light on what may be a similar phenomenon. Another more general problem is that of drawing a clear distinction between employers from the peasantry and those from slightly higher up the social scale, who fall outside the remit of this chapter. It may be that the attempt to draw a hard and fast line is not only unrealistic but misleading in that it assumes the existence of a border that was never wholly clear in practice.
A more specific problem in the case of manorial court rolls is that, while the frequency of references in some surviving series testifies to the presence of significant numbers of servants, in others they feature hardly at all. It seems improbable that this simply reflects the differing size of the servant population: the court rolls for the Durham Cathedral Priory estates include frequent injunctions that assume the widespread presence of servants (‘neither themselves nor their wives nor their servants …’), yet very few individual servants are mentioned; twenty-five servants are named in the poll tax returns for the Staffordshire manor of Alrewas, but they appear only infrequently in contemporary manorial court proceedings.3 This imbalance seems likely to be attributable to different court – or recording – practices.
Farm workers on peasant farms were of very different types, and this is reflected in the terminology. Perhaps most common in court rolls is the nonspecific term ‘servant’ (serviens or variants), also widely found outside the agricultural context. It was applied to men and women alike (thus ‘Agnes serviens of John Loveday’),4 although the word ancilla was also used for female servants. Another term in frequent use was mainpast (manupastus), which has the specific meaning of household member, though not necessarily kin. A third word regularly employed was famulus; it might be used interchangeably with mainpast: three Cuxham tenants were amerced twice at a court in 1299, first because their famuli had done bad work while performing labour services on their behalf, and then because their manupasti – who must surely have been the same men – had defamed the granger; a Great Walsham tenant was amerced in 1357 for an offence committed by his ‘famulus and mainpast’.5
All these words suggest someone employed on a formal basis for a fixed period of time, probably living in, and almost certainly unmarried. Persons described as servants in the Staffordshire poll tax returns were nearly always attached to households, by contrast with labourers (to whom I will return), who never were.6 It was no doubt mostly the more prosperous village tenants, those with the standard yardland or half yardland holdings, or more, who could afford and needed full-time servants: of two Stratton men known to have had famuli, one was a free tenant of one and a half yardlands, the other a bond tenant of a yardland.7
That substantial peasant tenants employed servants, or at least had ready access to a labour market, is assumed by manorial custumals. These were documents drawn up by manorial administrations to describe the ‘customs’, effectively obligations, owed by the tenants8; they are normative documents and as such need to be treated with caution. They assume the family unit as basic, supplemented as necessary by additional labour. Thus, though sick tenants were routinely excused certain labour services if the gravity of their illness could be demonstrated (the tenant ‘shriven and houselled’, for example),9 other services crucial to the lord, like ploughing, were still demanded; in any case, excusals were generally time-limited – at the end of a fixed period the tenant must return to work ‘whether well or sick, if the lord so wills’, as one custumal puts it.10 The underlying assumption is always that a substitute could be provided, which must often have been impossible for the depleted peasant family alone.
Similarly, the labour services meticulously listed in custumals were so heavy in large parts of the country that tenants must routinely have needed to hire additional labour to perform them.11 More specifically, though tenants were usually required to attend harvest boons with their whole familia (i.e., their household, including live-in servants), a fixed number of workers were increasingly demanded instead. For yardlanders, this was often three, sometimes four, even ‘at least four’,12 which is more than most tenants were likely to have had in the way of adult sons and daughters living at home. For tenants of smaller holdings, the numbers of workers to be provided was smaller, but not necessarily pro rata, and still often significant: the tenant of four acres at Cakeham had to find one man at one harvest boon and two men at two others.13
Whether tenants in this situation hired extra live-in servants or extra seasonal labour is not clear. Fox believed the former would work out cheaper in the long run and that, more generally, these heavy demands encouraged the employment of servants.14 Custumals seem often to anticipate extra casual labourers: if a Felsted yardlander employed more workers to reap his own corn ‘for wages’ during the harvest, he must at certain boons send more than the basic ‘at least four’ demanded; a Broughton tenant was distrained in 1298 for failing to send all the men ‘he has for his own work’ to a boon.15
So peasant farmers employed casual labour as well as full-time servants. There was no shortage of men and women who could be hired by the day in thirteenth-century villages, whether they were landless or tenants of just an acre or two of land. A different vocabulary was employed for these categories. The women were mulieres, like two anonymous females employed to carry loads of underwood at Chalgrave in 1278, or the mulieres ‘from outside’ illegally received in the harvest field at Cranfield in 1294.16 The men were usually operarii or homines. An ordinance of 1375 for Aycliffe neatly distinguishes between them and servants: ‘tenants and servitores and operarii’; as does a harvest ordinance for Great Horwood of 1322 prohibiting tenants from letting their operarios carry corn from the field ‘unless they are of his own household’; a yardlander without famuli at Weedon Bec must reap with his wife at the autumn boon, or find two homines.17
Another and more ambivalent word used of servants was garcio, best translated as ‘boy’ or ‘lad’, often, but not necessarily, implying youth, and perhaps also low pay.18 Yet a garcio might lease an acre or two of land, like Alexander, employed by a Chalgrave free tenant.19 Fox has noted the use of nicknames – sometimes jocular – for these ‘humble and probably youthful’ persons.20 A garcio who had ‘corrupted’ a woman fined for leyrwite on the Burton Abbey estate in 1327 was named, which is unusual for such offenders – perhaps a sign of prejudice against an offender of low status.21
The servants discussed so far were generalists (i.e., they would turn their hand to whatever job presented). Such flexibility was essential to the running of a small farm. There were, however, exceptions. First, though there is no doubt that women worked as agricultural labourers, it may be that full-time female servants were primarily employed in and around the farm house and yard, rather than in the fields.22 A specifically female role and its value was recognised: the farmer’s wife was often excluded from certain boon works; male tenants without a wife on some Glastonbury manors paid only half as much churchscot as a married man.23
Also, some peasant tenants employed specialised workers, most common being herdsmen, especially shepherds: Ralph Davy’s shepherd let his sheep graze the lord’s corn at Branston in 1327; Adam, shepherd of William Hawys of Walsham, was fined for damage in the lord’s herbage in 1338.24 William was one of several Walsham tenants who accumulated large flocks of sheep in the fourteenth century, and he was prosperous enough to pay tax of 4s. in 1327.25 It is hard to tell how common such servants were, though their value is hardly in doubt – they could provide continuity of care as well as special skills. Many custumals assume substantial tenants employed stockmen – they, like the farmer’s wife, were regularly excluded from the obligation on the yardlander’s familia to attend boon works.26 Men identifiable by their surname as herds or described as such appear frequently in court rolls, like the Walter the shepherd who leased an acre of arable and half an acre of meadow for two crops in Holywell in 1288, or the Stephen the shepherd who sublet part of a yard at Abbots Ripton for ten years in 1294.27 We rarely know who employed these men or on what terms, though we know that some tenants put livestock in the care of a herd on a temporary basis and others opted out of the common village herd system. William Bernard of Alrewas, amerced in 1328 ‘because he did not pay the shepherd according to custom’, was from a prominent local family and unlikely to be driven by poverty.28 In any case, the line between village herd and entrepreneur may often have been thin.29 In the unsettled decades after the Black Death, the post was found satisfactory by some, unsatisfactory by others: the common shepherd of Nunholm left the village, leaving the sheep uncared for, but a privately employed cowherd, John Nethird of Folkton, left his post to earn more looking after the cattle of the neighbouring village of Flixton.30 In any case, the common herd, whether of pigs, cattle or sheep, survived into the early modern period.
The other specialist employed by some tenants was a carter. Robert Hovel of High Hall’s carter committed an unspecified offence with his cart in 1338.31 However, a cart was a standard piece of equipment on peasant farms, and it was probably more common for generalist farmworkers to do whatever carting was necessary, with occasional recourse to specialist village carters, or indeed anyone with spare time and equipment. Or, like a Writtle carter in 1379, such a ‘specialist’ might be required to ‘do other necessary things’ at slack times.32 Like herdsmen, carters are prominent among the unattached single persons listed at the end of many poll tax returns.33
The occupation of carter was often paired with that of ploughman. This was another occupation where skill was at a premium, and the equipment expensive. Ploughmen were sometimes hired by peasant farmers for a few days in spring or autumn, often with their animals and ploughs – as in one case at Havering in the 1390s for two days in March, and, in another, for three days with three horses and one servant.34
So peasant farmers regularly employed men and women of different types to help run their farms, ranging from casual labourers to full-time servants by way of specialist workers. Who were these people, and on what terms were they employed?
Let us look first at full-time servants. How many there were is very difficult to know. Zvi Razi estimated that at least 43% of Halesowen families employed servants in the fifty years before the Black Death.35 As noted above, full-time servants probably generally ‘lived in’; we know that peasant houses were often capable of accommodating several persons.36 They may often have been young, with hopes of one day marrying and becoming tenants themselves. They were what historians call life-cycle servants.37 John Pach of Walsham seems to fit this bill: his first court appearance, in 1329, was as a farm servant, but he appears at later courts as an established tenant, essoining on his own behalf in 1339 and on that of another tenant in 1345, acting as pledge in 1347, and married by 1349; so does John Gibbes of Badbury (Wilts), who successfully claimed unpaid wages at a court in 1357 and laid out £10 to enter a virgate holding at the next.38
Many servants remained in service for a number of years. Hilary Typetot, daughter of Anne Typetot, was apparently employed by three different Walsham tenants between 1334 and 1342; she is successively described, in entries recording offences she had committed, as ‘servant of Henry of Saxmundham’, as living ‘in the house of William Hawys’ and as ‘servant of Reginald Pynfoul’. She paid her own amercement each time but was pledged by her employer. She then disappears from the record; perhaps she married.39 Her surname shows she came from a village family, as is often the case with full-time servants, and her career suggests a certain fluidity of employment within the village. Other servants chose to stay put: Agnes Waleys of Weldon worked in the same Brigstock household for at least five and possibly eight or even more years; a Writtle man claimed in 1339 to have been in the same employer’s service for ten years.40
We are able to trace the marital careers of four Walsham women described as ‘living in the house of’ (different) named men in 1353, and presumably servants. The marriages of three are recorded, six, eight and twelve years later, implying a longish prior period of service, no doubt after an early start. They did not necessarily marry humbly. Though a ‘villein by blood’, Christiana Rampoyle married a free man and, as she did so without permission, was required to pay a fine of half a mark. Alone among the four, however, she had in 1353 been living in the house of man with the same surname, presumably a relative, possibly her father.41 A less stable future seems to have awaited the fourth of these women, Agnes Hulk, also a ‘villein by blood’; no marriage is recorded in her case and she fined three times for childwite after giving birth outside wedlock, in 1354, 1361 and 1366. One uninformative reference apart, these are her only appearances.42
Relations between servants and employers were generally formalised by contracts. These were probably oral, so recorded only when they broke down and came to the notice of the manorial court, as illustrated by two cases at Halesowen in the 1370s: William Ketel, a smallholder and a man ‘often in debt’, sued a yardlander for not providing his two daughters, ‘who served in his household’, with enough food and cloth as agreed, as well as more general ill-treatment; two years later, William sued another rich peasant tenant for not providing his daughter with two tunics, as agreed; we may wonder whether William’s daughters were unusually unfortunate in their employers or had an unusually conscientious – or litigious – father.43 Less clear is what lies behind a case at Stratton in 1283, when John de la Grutte sued Walter Bacon because ‘he did not make an agreement with him to remain his famulus’ in winter; whatever was going on here, it was John who was found to be at fault and amerced.44 Non-payment of 12d. was alleged in a case at Alrewas in 1341, wages due on the feast of St Edith (16 September), perhaps date of an instalment or final payment of a fixed-term contract.45
Live-in service on long-term contracts had many advantages for employers seeking a stable and relatively cheap supply of labour, and this was especially so at a time of high wages and labour shortage, as in the decades after the Black Death. That employment on these terms was less popular with servants is shown by prosecutions of offenders under the new labour laws intended to maintain it (servants must serve only ‘by terms of entire years or other usual terms’, according to the Statute of Labourers of 1351).46 We are given a rare glimpse of servant attitudes and of the widespread hostility to the constraints of annual contracts, to life in a hierarchical peasant household and to terms of service experienced as demeaning. Whether these attitudes were new, or only revealed and articulated when changed economic circumstances opened up other possibilities, is impossible to know, though it has been observed that the new attitudes had echoes of the contemporary desire to escape servile tenure.47
Resentment of inferior foodstuffs was widespread: a Lincolnshire ploughman insisted on ‘fresh, not salt, meat’, a Kesteven servant on rye and wheat instead of the rye and peas he took previously.48 Cash wages were preferred to the provision of clothing, with its feudal overtones, like the ‘pair of britches and pair of shoes’ figuring in a contract an Essex man rejected.49 Workers wanted freedom of movement, enabling them to seek higher wages and better terms, if necessary a few miles from home. And they wanted the right to marry, traditionally denied to live-in servants. One Suffolk employer struck and wounded a male servant because he married an ancilla in the same household.50 Worse is the evidence of sexual predation by masters – and their male relatives – revealed at ecclesiastical courts; or the hints of weakness and exploitation in, for example, the frequency of leyrwite cases involving ancillae in the Durham Halmote rolls.51 By contrast, servants living independently and listed in poll tax returns were often married: twelve of twenty-six taxpaying labourers at Amstone and Bures, fifteen of twenty-four at Belchamp Otten and seventeen of forty-three at Felsted (all Essex) in 1381.52
Casual workers, too, were subject to more than purely economic constraints. So pressing was the need for harvest workers in arable areas that even when labour was cheap and plentiful, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, steps were taken to secure a local labour force. A successful harvest was in everyone’s interests, and attempts to control the labour market were in part a response to this. Nevertheless, despite the communitarian language, the dominance of the chief employers, the better-off peasant farmers, seems to be behind by-laws that strengthened their hand against their prospective labour force. In essence, all men and women able to work were expected to make themselves available in the locality at this season: a 1290 by-law at Newton Longville decreed that no one fit to work could glean ‘if there be any who want to hire him’; at Brightwaltham, a by-law of 1340 said that ‘no worker’ was to go outside the liberty to work without permission, specifying a penalty of 2s.; a Littleport woman who ‘absented herself from the harvest and would not reap the corn of her lord and her neighbours for her wages’, and went elsewhere, was amerced 2d. in the manorial court in 1325.53 More systematic resistance is hinted at in the prosecution of eight Chalgrave men who, in 1304, had ‘led their neighbours’ out of the parish to work for ‘strangers’.54
The acute labour shortage after the Black Death only aggravated a perennially tense situation, leading to the new legislation already referred to, which also attempted to control the wages and freedom of movement of all workers. Prosecutions reveal the persistence of the presumption that anyone able to work should accept employment locally if it was offered. Attempts to control the movement of labour continued in manorial courts: in 1372, eight men and women were amerced 6d. each at Burton for having withdrawn ‘in autumn’.55 However, the emphasis shifted to the new legislation, and those using and enforcing it included substantial peasant farmers.56 This, too, encountered more or less systematic resistance on the part of those it targeted: a man who left Market Weighton to seek work had refused to mow ‘with his neighbours’; at Forncet, a certain Robert Archer led ‘six or eight labourers’ out of the village every autumn, leaving local people, it was claimed, ‘greatly reduced and impoverished’ (1370s); two named labourers and ‘certain others’ from Appleby, instructed to serve ‘the community’ in autumn as they used to, refused (1373).57
However, the vast majority of prosecutions concerned wages. A mower from Friesthorpe and a reaper from Newton on Trent named Elena were only two of many who had taken what were dubbed ‘excessive wages’.58 Three Reighton women, described as ‘mowers and servants’, had both taken excessive wages and refused to serve locally,59 and the vast majority of prosecutions were of men and women who had travelled to neighbouring villages in search of higher wages.
There are many unanswered questions concerning this movement of labour. Why were so many workers apparently able to obtain higher wages only a few miles from home? Was there a greater prejudice against paying higher wages to local people than to strangers?60 It is difficult to explain the pattern of prosecutions, perhaps dictated by factors we cannot recover. An ambivalent or even outright hostile attitude to strangers arriving in search of work predated the new legislation: an ordinance of 1294 at Birdbrook (Essex) prohibited tenants from receiving or harbouring ‘anyone unknown’ during the coming autumn; at Great Horwood, it was ‘unknown strangers’ who were forbidden.61 At Stratton, a widow was presented in 1276 for ‘receiving’ two women in the autumn, and two other tenants for each receiving an ancilla. In all three cases, the amercements were condoned on account of poverty – perhaps putting up itinerant harvest workers was here a way of supplementing a meagre income.62
In the end, of course, wages responded to the market and rose; the wages of a day labourer were probably three times higher in the early fifteenth century than a century earlier.63 The individual wages paid varied enormously, but an agricultural worker who had typically received 1d. day at the turn of the thirteenth century could be confident of 4d. towards the end of the fourteenth century. Many got more: of those specifically mentioned above, Robert Archer of Forncet and his fellow workers were taking 6d. a day and their food, the mowers variously 7d. and 8d. per acre or 4d. a day plus food. Those who paid higher wages must have included many peasant farmers. Indeed, it may be that they prospered because they were less hidebound by traditional methods and proved better able to adapt to new conditions. Certainly, some peasant tenants, those with sufficient capital and ambition, were able to accumulate larger farms by taking over unclaimed holdings or by leasing demesne land as large estates withdrew from direct farming.64 Yet there are indications that the number of servants employed in peasant households fell. Razi estimated that only some 20% of families employed servants in the fifty years after the Black Death.65 Servants are noticeably fewer in the Walsham-le-Willows court rolls of this period. The poll tax returns of 1377–81 suggest that only one in every eight households in some eighty Cotswold villages had a servant; the figure was about one sixth in rural Rutland, and similar in the West Riding of Yorkshire.66
This prompts two related questions, did the number of farm workers overall decline at this period and how did peasant farmers cultivate their holdings? Tenants had always employed their own children, like Robert Taylor of Walsham, whose ‘servant’ Hilary, mentioned in 1334, was probably his daughter given that, some ten years later, he gave a daughter of that name in marriage and pledged her when she was amerced 6s. 8d. for marrying without leave.67 This practice continued and the poll tax returns for some counties often describe children as servants. But peasant farmers also turned to their neighbours. They hired or borrowed each other’s animals and equipment – a ploughshare and a coulter in 1372 and a plough and a muck cart in 1382 at Halesowen – or they hired neighbours for specific jobs, such as carting peas or muck. Thomas Schyrlet of Halesowen hired a fellow tenant to harrow his land in 1384 and he himself carted and ploughed for another tenant in 1387 and again in 1390.68 The line between smallholders and labourers was never rigid, but the distinction became even more blurred; at least a third of the population of late medieval England may have gained all or part of their livelihood from wage labour.69 In any case, the reduction in the demands for labour services through commutation or simple abandonment reduced the pressure on family labour.
But many people remained dependent on wages, even if they held an acre or two of land, and there were still plenty of landless persons unable to take on a holding even if one was available.70 Tenants at Havering hired workers for a wide range of tasks, including hedging a grove, seeding wheat and threshing oats.71 The poll tax returns of 1381 reveal large numbers of specialist and general labourers who were not attached to households but listed separately, some paying the full rate of 12d. In the 1381 Gloucestershire returns, about 40% of taxpayers who are heads of household (i.e., excluding wives and children) were servants or labourers; about 10% of the population of Rutland villages were servants in 1377, just over 7% in the Coquetdale region of Northumbria.72
In fact, peasant farmers continued to employ a mix of full-time servants and casual labour, and attitudes to servants, and their position and status in village society, continued to be ambivalent. They were indispensable, but a source of unease, especially when they were strangers or without land, so seen as constituting an unstable element. ‘Receiving’ and housing this mix of strangers and landless persons was a perennial source of tension in villages. A glimpse of the rather jumbled living arrangements that were probably common comes in a court roll for Chalgrove, where a group of men and women were presented in Wingfield for having gardens opening onto the village field – an arrangement in itself viewed with suspicion as facilitating a range of offences – and for receiving strangers. They included three unnamed mulieres described as [living] ‘in the house’ of Richard Gobyon; Godde, identified only as a subtenant; a certain Wymark (whose daughter had recently been excused an amercement for stealing stubble because she ‘has nothing’); a famulus employed by Walter le seriant; and Hugh the carter.73 An entry in the Ellington custumal suggests a proliferation of small houses occupied by the less well off, including labourers: one man must be found for the love boon by every house (domus) with a door opening onto the road, whether occupied by molmen or by cottagers and operarii.74
Measures were in place to keep servants under control. If they were resident for more than a year they must be enrolled in a tithing. Two villagers at Birdbrook were each amerced 2d. for ‘housing’ a servant and the servants 3d. each because they were not in a tithing yet lived ‘within the precinct’ (1378).75 Their conduct was generally seen as the responsibility of their employers. It was often they who paid when servants were amerced in the manorial courts, like Alice Lefe, who had to pay 3d. in 1317 because her servant, Robert, had committed damage in the lord’s beans at Walsham, or Thomas Marjory, amerced 4d. in 1316 because his mainpasts had knocked down pannage in a close belonging to the lord, damaging his trees.76 As in this last case, the servants are frequently not themselves named in the court record. Sometimes, both employer and servant were amerced, or the servant paid his or her own amercement, but the employer acted as pledge, like Robert Lene of Walsham when Richard Winter was amerced 3d. for damage harvesting wheat, ‘because [Richard is his] servant’.77
When, as in this last case, peasant tenants used servants to perform their labour services, they were held responsible for their work. On the Ramsey Abbey manors, peasants were amerced for their servants’ bad work harvesting peas, threshing and, most of all, reaping: one mainpast had reaped the lord’s corn badly, another had compounded an offence in the harvest field by speaking ill of the sergeant, a third – in an act of humanity or protest? – had ‘given the lord’s corn to a gleaner’.78 In the thirteenth century, when labour services were at their height, this responsibility was written into manorial custumals: at Quarley, the yardlander must ‘be there all day’ at the boon to ensure his workers reaped ‘well and safely’, and also when the lord’s sheep were washed, to see they did the job ‘safely’; at Shillington the yardlander was to stand over and admonish his workers to ensure they worked properly.79
Responsibility implied authority, and this was often boosted by the injunction that the supervision be done ‘rod in hand’: on the Burton Abbey manors, the yardlanders must ‘stand there all day with a rod’; at Walsham, ‘they should go with their rods to be over the reapers …’.80 The rod (virga) was deeply symbolic and that its use in this way was an exclusively male prerogative is implied at Broughton, where the custumal specifically states that the yardlander, but not his wife, should bear the rod over his operarios at the boon.81
This authority in the harvest field was at one level simply an extension of the powers and responsibilities of any head of household or gaffer in his own home and on his own farm. Medieval village society was hierarchical, and so were peasant households. Though we know little about their internal workings, there is archaeological and other evidence of a domestic hierarchy, in, for example, the single chair or banker for the use of the head of household.82 More theoretically, Michael Clanchy has emphasised that even unfree peasants had ‘lordly power’ (potestas dominica) in the domestic sphere, with wives, children and animals – and presumably also servants – living ‘under the rod’ of the head of household.83
The desire of manorial administrations to reinforce a hierarchy that served their interests by ensuring an orderly workforce for the demesne harvest and by, more generally, promoting stability in the village is revealed in other ways. To the right or duty to supervise rod in hand was added a range of privileges at harvest suppers. Better food and drink might be provided for the yardlanders or they might be seated more ‘honourably’ (honestius), as at Moreton Sandeville.84 How this affected relations between those involved is hard to tell. Such special treatment at the hands of the lord might bring symbolic prestige and distinction within village society, but at a cost. An ostentatious enforcement of unpopular labour services put the employer-peasants in an invidious position.
That cooperation could not be assumed is revealed in the custumals themselves in the rather threatening form of the injunctions, in the emphasis on responsibility (‘he shall be answerable to the lord … if the work is done badly’; ‘he must make good any damage’ done by workers) and in the need to specify penalties for noncooperation (the sokemen at Stoneleigh were to be punished graviter if they failed to present ‘deficient or bad workers’ at the bedrepe).85 And court rolls confirm that collaboration was not always forthcoming. A tenant at Chalgrave was to be distrained because he did not come in person to supervise at the great harvest boon; tenants sent weak or old workers, of necessity or from disaffection.86 The many persons amerced for faults in connection with labour services included substantial tenants: John Nunn, the Broughton tenant in trouble for not sending all the men he should to the boon (see above), was a juror at that and other courts.87 Idonea Isabel of High Hall, summoned to reap ‘for money’ in 1345, reaped ‘for money’ for a local peasant tenant instead, against the bailiff’s orders, thereby incurring an amercement of 3d. – her employer may have offered higher wages, but it may also be that Idonea preferred not to labour on the demesne.88
Servants and their employers were part of a complex village hierarchy. Servants were not without status in the village. It was not only as servants or as offenders that they appeared in manorial courts. Relations of trust might develop and servants be treated with respect, as when male servants essoined on behalf of their masters, like the famuli of William le Knift, on at least two occasions, or like two famuli of Nicholas Wardibec of Stratton, Philip (in 1277) and John (in 1282), though Nicholas also regularly essoined by one of his sons.89 Even a garcio might essoin for his employer, as did a certain Henry for Richard Mabel of Alrewas in 1329.90
Servants could and did take action on their own behalf, seeking the protection of the manorial court against non-payment of wages or unreasonable treatment by their employer. Cecilia Pakerel was successful in her claim that Clement Ayse of Chatteris had unjustly withheld 3d. and a quarter [of corn] from her wages in autumn; Margaret Gobert was amerced 2d. for having unjustly withheld 14d. for seven days’ autumn wages in 1328.91 When Peter de Cotom broke his contract with his employer, Thomas de Alemouth, in 1370, he was amerced 6d. and fined 12d. in damages, but when Thomas entered Peter’s house (domum) and assaulted him, he in turn was amerced (6d.) and required pay substantially heavier damages (40d.).92 At Halesowen, ‘one of the wealthiest villagers in Ridgeacre’ was amerced 4d. for an offence against his garcio, and when ‘one of the most powerful men in the hamlet’ (of Hunnington) assaulted his servant Agnes, the township was amerced 12d. for not reporting him.93 A Stretton famulus successfully sued in 1327 when he was not paid for a bullock sold to a local man; a jury cleared an Alrewas servant falsely accused by a local tenant of theft in 1349.94 And servants often paid their own amercements, as if acting independently and in possession of some money.95
Warm relations might develop. A female servant at Brigstock was willed a house and courtyard by her employers, with immediate use of a garden plot; when, in 1382, Betona, an ancilla at Billingham, got involved in a dispute with another woman during which she assaulted her seriously enough to draw blood, Betona’s master and his wife intervened on her behalf.96 But relations sometimes broke down completely. Servants of both sexes were assaulted by their employers, as we have seen, though they sometimes gave as good as they got: in 1275, a Halesowen servant, Alice, stole from a widow who had once employed her, set fire to her house and fled the district; the servant of a rich Halesowen peasant’s wife ended up in a fight with her mistress in 1374.97 Less dramatically, it was the frankpledge that presented an Alrewas tenant for assaulting his female servant (he was amerced 6d.) and the vill of Illey that raised the hue and then presented a Halesowen tenant for wounding his garcio.98
Tensions in the employer/farm worker relationship were inherent and, as we have seen, measures by substantial tenants to exert control over servants as a group were widespread in the thirteenth century. But if tensions were perennial, they were aggravated in the post-Black death period when a concerted attempt was made on behalf of employers to enforce fixed-term contracts, restrict movement and hold down wages. Nevertheless, there remained no unbridgeable gulf between peasant employers and their farm workers. They were all, in the last analysis, peasants, and seigneurial demands were a constant reminder of the subservient status they shared, well into the fifteenth century. Many servants came from village families; some of the tenants who employed them may once have been servants themselves. Very few households had more than a couple of servants.99 These farms remained essentially family concerns. When extra labour was needed, tenants engaged in reciprocal relationships in which cash played no part or hired fellow tenants who needed to supplement their income from occasional paid work, as well as employing people who were full-time servants. True, there were landless people doomed to a lifetime of scratching a living in paid employment that was never assured and often only seasonal. This ‘non-landholding, politically invisible subsection of the community’ is by definition difficult for the historian to pin down.100 We may assume their numbers increased at times when the countryside was populous and labour was cheap, as at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but there were still plenty of poor in the post-Black Death countryside, even though wages had risen.101 They were at one end of the spectrum of a highly disparate group, at the other end of which were servants like the man employed in 1487 on a traditional one-year contract specifying a salary plus robe, pair of hose and cap.102 Irrespective of the differences and the tensions, they were all essential to the functioning of the peasant farm, playing their part in a ‘necessary collaboration’.103
Notes
1. H. S. A. Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless by lords and tenants in early medieval England’, in Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Zvi Razi and Richard Smith (Oxford, 1996), pp. 518–68.
2. See, for example P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘What was a servant?’, in Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 1–20; P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Migration, youth and gender in Late Medieval England’, in Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 85ff.; John Langdon, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates in medieval England: the case of old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256 – 1357’, in Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages, ed. Ben Dodds and Christian D. Liddy. Essays in Honour of Richard Britnell (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 25–44; Jordan Claridge and John Langdon, ‘The composition of famuli labour on English demesnes, c. 1300’, Agricultural History Review, 63, 2 (2015), pp. 187–220; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death. Essex 1350 – 1525 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 183–206.
3. (1365) Durham Halmote Rolls, Surtees Society, 82 (1889), p. 45 (‘nec ipsi nec uxores sui nec servientes sui’), see also pp. 58, 79, 108, 144 et al.; R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 35.
4. Manorial Records of Cuxham, Oxfordshire circa 1200–1359, ed. P. D. A. Harvey, Oxfordshire Record Society, 50 and Historical Manuscripts Commission 23 (1976), p. 694 (1354).
5. Manorial Records of Cuxham, p. 619; Poos, A Rural Society, p. 200.
6. R. H. Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 34; see also, for Gloucestershire, his ‘Some social and economic evidence in late Medieval English tax returns’, in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism (revised edn, London, 1990), p. 188.
7. Court Rolls of the Wiltshire Manors of Adam de Stratton, ed. R. B. Pugh, Wiltshire Record Society, 24 (1970), p. 49 (1280); Accounts and Surveys of the Wiltshire lands of Adam de Stratton, ed. M. W. Farr, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Records Branch, 14 (1959), p. 5. Stratton Court Rolls, p. 56 (1279); Stratton Accounts, p. 13.
8. Discussed more fully in Jean Birrell, ‘Manorial custumals reconsidered’, Past & Present, 224, pp. 3–37 (August, 2014).
9. Thirteen Custumals of the Sussex Manors of the Bishop of Chichester, ed. W. D. Peckham, Sussex Record Society, 31 (1925), p. 53 (Amberley).
10. Two Registers Formerly Belonging to the Family of Beauchamp of Hatch, ed. H. C. Maxwell- Lyte, Somerset Record Society, 35 (1920).
11. Useful survey of incidence in Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200 – 1500, (New York, 2003), p. 66.
12. Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity Caen, ed. Marjory Chibnall (1982), p. 89 (Felsted).
13. Thirteen Custumals, p. 6.
14. Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’.
15. Charters and Custumals of Caen, p. 89; W. O. Ault, ed., Court Rolls of the Abbey of Ramsey and of the Honor of Clare (Newhaven, 1928), p. 198.
16. Court Roll of Chalgrave Manor 1278–313, ed. Marian Dale, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 28 (1948), p. 2; ‘mulieres extraneas’: Court Rolls of Ramsey, p. 235. Useful discussion of these terms in Langdon, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates’, p. 33.
17. Durham Halmote Rolls, p. 128; ‘nisi est de famula sua propria’:Warren R. Ault, ‘Open-field husbandry and the village community: a study of agrarian by-laws in medieval England’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 55, part 7 (1965), p. 60 (with other examples); Select Documents of the English Lands of the Abbey of Bec, ed. Marjory Chibnall, Camden Third Series, 73 (1951), p. 100.
18. Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’, pp. 520–1; Langdon, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates’, p. 41; see also Claridge and Langdon, ‘Composition of famuli labour’, pp. 202ff.
19. Court Roll of Chalgrave, p. 15.
20. Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’, pp. 538–9.
21. Staffordshire Record Office, D1734/2/1/101, m. 13 (1327).
22. Simon A. C. Penn, ‘Female wage earners in late fourteenth-century England’, Agricultural History Review, 35, 1 (1987), pp. 1–14. More recently, Sandy Bardsley, ‘Women’s work reconsidered’, Past & Present, 165 (1999), pp. 3–29.
23. Cartularium monasterii de Rameseia, ed. W. H. Hart and P. A. Lyons, vol. 1, pp. 311, 322, 324, 369, 394 et al.; see also vol. 2, p. 24; Miriam Müller, ‘Peasant women, agency and status in mid-thirteenth- to late fourteenth-century England’, in Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe, ed. Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens (Woodbridge, 2013), p. 99. For women as a ‘reserve workforce’, see Langdon, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates’, p. 26.
24. SRO, D1734/2/1/101, m. 9; Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows, 1303–50, ed. Ray Lock, Suffolk Records Society, 41 (1998), p. 227.
25. Court Rolls of Walsham le Willows, 1303–50, pp. 230, 243, 248, 256 et al.; Susan Kilby, ‘Mapping peasant discontent: trespassing on manorial land in fourteenth century Walsham-le-Willows’, Landscape History, 36, 2 (2015), p. 82.
26. Two men, according to George Ewart Evans, could not be spared for the harvest, the stockman and the horseman: Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, p. 90.
27. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility (Toronto, 1964), pp. 75, 77. See also Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 99, 192, 233, 263, 264, 275 et al.; another example in Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’, p. 536.
28. SRO, D(W)O/3/9, Court Sunday 24 June 1328; and for two others, see Nov 1346–47, m. 2 (1346).
29. Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 50–1.
30. Bertha Putnam, ed., Yorkshire Sessions of the Peace 1361-1364 (Cambridge, 1939), no. 32a, p. 77; ibid., no. 18, pp. 10–11.
31. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 221 (for Robert, see pp. 214, 221, 228, 237). See also ibid., p. 88.
32. Poos, A Rural Society, p. 205. See also Penn and Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws’, in Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London, 1994), pp. 174–5.
33. Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 33.
34. Marjory McIntosh, Autonomy and Community. The Royal Manor of Havering (Cambridge, 1986), p. 161. See also Elaine Clark, ‘Debt litigation in a late Medieval English village’, in Pathways to Medieval Peasants, ed. J. A. Raftis (Toronto, 1981), p. 261; Christopher Dyer, ‘Warwickshire farming 1349 – c. 1520. Preparations for agricultural revolution’, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 27 (1981), pp. 24–5.
35. Zvi Razi, ‘Family, land and the village community in later medieval England’, Past & Present, 93 (November 1981), p. 31.
36. Christopher Dyer, ‘Living in peasant houses in Late Medieval England’, Vernacular architecture, 44 (2013), pp. 20, 23–5; Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 160–9.
37. The classic account, but for a later period, and therefore to be used by medievalists with care, is Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981).
38. He was dead by 1349: Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 128, 238, 282, 305, 327, 335; see also p. 235. For another example, see Richard Winter, servant of Robert Lene in 1331, one of several tenants amerced for trespassing animals in 1333: pp. 141, 166; Miriam Müller, ‘A divided class? Peasants and peasant communities in Later Medieval England’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, eds Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss, and Chris Wickham (Oxford, 2007), p. 130.
39. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 176, 235, 261.
40. Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside (Oxford, 1987), p. 83; Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 203–4 (with other examples of long service).
41. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1351–99, ed. Ray Lock, Suffolk Records Society, 45 (2002), p. 41. See also, for Cristiana Rampoyle, Ibid., p. 92; for Alice Taylor, Idem, p. 60; for Hilary Pyntoul, Idem, p. 50. For female servants marrying and exiting service, see Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 189–90.
42. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1351–99, pp. 41, 43, 60, 67, 85; an Agnes Hulk who paid 3s to marry in 1317 may have been her mother: Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 57.
43. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish. Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270 – 1400 (Cambridge, 1980), no. 148 on p. 79.
44. ‘Non fecit pactum cum eo ad morandum famulus suus’: Stratton Court Rolls, pp. 81, 82.
45. SRO, D(W)O/3/26, m. 3.
46. L. R. Poos, ‘The social context of statute of labourers enforcement’, Law and History Review, 1, 1 (1983), p. 30. More generally: Bertha Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349-59 (New York, 1908). See also Judith M. Bennett, ‘Compulsory service in late Medieval England’, Past & Present, 209 (November, 2010), pp. 7–51.
47. Simon Penn and Christopher Dyer, ‘Wages and earnings in late Medieval England: evidence from the enforcement of the labour laws’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 43, 3 (1990), p. 366; see also Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 232–3.
48. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers, p. 91; Records of Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire 1360–75, ed. R. Sillem, Publications of the Lincolnshire Record Society, 30 (1936), no. 116, p. 173.
49. N. Ritchie, ‘Labour conditions in Essex in the reign of Richard II’, Economic History Review, 4 (1934), repr. in Essays in Economic History, 2 (1387–88), p. 93.
50. Poos, A Rural Society, p. 191.
51. Poos, A Rural Society, p. 192; Durham Halmote Rolls, pp. 13, 18, 27, 68, 74, 132 (all 1332–75).
52. C. Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381 (Ontario, 1969), pp. 168–70, 171–2. See also Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 33–5.
53. Ault, Open-field husbandry, pp. 13, 15.
54. Court Roll of Chalgrave, p. 51.
55. SRO, D1734/2/1/102, m. 22. See also Miriam Müller, ‘Conflict and revolt: the bishop of Ely and his peasants at the Manor of Brandon in Suffolk c. 1300-81’, Rural History, 23, 1 (2012), p. 4; Ault, Open-field husbandry, pp. 15–6.
56. Poos, ‘Social context of statute of labourers enforcement’; Penn and Dyer, p. 359.
57. Yorks Sessions of the Peace, nos 176, 210, p. 71; A. Harding, ed. The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1973), p. 175; Lincs Sessions of the Peace, no. 118, p. 36.
58. Lincs Sessions of the Peace, no. 43, p. 22; no. 60, p. 25; see also no. 59.
59. Yorks Sessions of the Peace, no. 63, p. 52; see also no. 120, p. 58.
60. See also Ault, ‘Open-field husbandry’, pp. 13–6, 84; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 130–8, 268–70.
61. Though also ‘known’ (aliquem extraneum seu notum): Poos, A Rural Society, p. 199; Ault, Open-field husbandry, p. 59, no. 33 (extraneos ignotos). More generally, see ibid., pp. 13–6, 84; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, pp. 130–8, 268–70.
62. Stratton Court Rolls, p. 33; see also p. 80.
63. Schofield, Peasant and Community, pp. 31–2. See also Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 218–9, 223–4. Useful tabulation of wages of common labourers, harvest workers and ploughmen in Ritchie, ‘Labour conditions in Essex’, pp. 104–5, 108.
64. Zvi Razi, ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, Past & Present, 140 (August 1993), p. 30; Hilton, ‘Some social and economic evidence’, p. 190; Barbara Harvey, ‘The leasing of the Abbot of Westminster’s demesnes in the later middle ages’, Economic History Review, 22 (1969), pp. 20–6. Ritchie, ‘Labour conditions in Essex’, pp. 100–1; Dyer, ‘Warwickshire farming’, pp. 4–8.
65. Zvi Razi, ‘Family, land and the village community’, p. 31.
66. Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 33; Schofield, Peasant and Community, pp. 140–1, quoting Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle (1992), pp. 161, 165–7.
67. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 273, 283. See also Fox, ‘Exploitation of the landless’, pp. 523 (‘if [he] shall have a son or daughter or anyone under his protection in his own house for a year … serving within [the manor]’), 525–6.
68. Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 49–50.
69. Razi, ‘Family, land and the village community’, pp. 31–3; Poos, A Rural Society, pp. 185–6. See also McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, pp. 160–1; Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 213.
70. Schofield, Peasant and Community, p. 86.
71. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, p. 161 (early fifteenth century).
72. Hilton, ‘Some social and economic evidence’ p. 189; P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle (Oxford, 1992), p. 159. See also Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 212–3.
73. Court Roll of Chalgrave, p. 20 (1287).
74. But they were not to get a meal: Cartularium de Rameseia, vol. 1, p. 488.
75. Schofield, Peasant and Community, p. 253.
76. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 55 (1317); Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 35 (1316); see also p. 156. Another example: Court Rolls of Ramsey, p. 232.
77. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 142 (1331), 141.
78. Court Rolls of Ramsey, pp. 232, 233 (1294); ibid., pp. 231 (1294), 192 (1288).
79. English Lands of the Abbey of Bec, p. 58; Cartularium monasterii de Rameseia, vol. 1, p. 459.
80. Three thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Surveys of Burton Abbey Manors, ed. Nigel J. Tringham, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 4th series, 20 (2004), p. 38; Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 247 (et al.).
81. ‘Deferet virgam ultra suos operarios et non uxor’: Cartularium de Rameseia, vol. 1, pp. 336–7 (Broughton).
82. Christopher Dyer, ‘Public and private lives in the medieval household’, in Love, Marriage and Family Ties, ed. I. Davis, M. Müller and Sarah Mars Jones (Turnhout, 2003), p. 237; Dyer, ‘Living in peasant houses in Late Medieval England’, p. 21.
83. Michael Clanchy, England and Its Rulers: 1066 – 1307, Ch. 15.
84. TNA, SC 11/83. For fuller discussion, see Jean Birrell, ‘Peasants eating and drinking’, Agricultural History Review, 63, 1 (2015), pp. 13–5.
85. Surveys of Burton Abbey Manors, p. 38; English Lands of the Abbey of Bec, p. 58; Stoneleigh Leger Book, ed. R. H. Hilton, Dugdale Society, 24 (1960), p. 103.
86. Court Roll of Chalgrave, p. 54 (1305) (see also Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 119); Manorial Records of Cuxham, p. 618; Thirteen Custumals, p. 16 (Selsey); Cartularium de Rameseia, vol. 1, pp. 369, 394. See useful discussion in Isabel Alfonso, ‘Exploring difference within rural communities in the northern Iberian kingdoms, 1000 – 1300’, in Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, pp. 91, 99.
87. Court Rolls of Ramsey, pp. 197, 198, 206.
88. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 284.
89. Stratton Court Rolls, pp. 52, 101, see also 103; ibid., pp. 39, 71, see also 28, 31, 38, 45, 55, 69, 72, 76, 89, 106, 109.
90. SRO, D(W)O/3/12, m. 10.
91. Court Rolls of Ramsey, p. 277; SRO, D1734/2/1/101, m. 18. See also Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, p. 202 (1335).
92. Durham Halmote Rolls, p. 92.
93. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, no. 148 (1294, 1342), pp. 78–9.
94. SRO, D1734/2/1/101, m. 15; D(W)O/3/35, m. 2.
95. Court Rolls of Walsham, 1303–50, pp. 148, 156, 240, 271 et al.
96. Bennett, Women in the countryside, p. 62 (1339); Durham Halmote Rolls, p.173. For another wounded garcio, see Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, 1217–307, ed. J. Amphlett, S. G. Hamilton and R. A. Wilson, 3 vols, Worcs. Hist. Soc. (1910), p. 61.
97. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, no. 148 on pp. 82–3, 79, no. 148.
98. SRO, D(W)O/3/37, m. 1; Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, 1217–307, p. 61.
99. Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 31–3; Poos, A Rural Society, p. 188.
100. Phillipp R. Schofield, ‘Tenurial developments and the availability of customary land in a later medieval community’, Economic History Review, 49, 2 (1996), p. 262.
101. Christopher Dyer, ‘Poverty and its relief in late Medieval England’, Past & Present, 216 (August 2012), pp. 41–78.
102. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, p. 232. And see Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry.
103. Marc Bloch, French Rural History. An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London, 1966), pp. 193–4 (speaking of substantial cultivators and smallholders), quoted by Clark, ‘Debt litigation in a late Medieval English village’, p. 261.