14
Peter L. Larson
Peasant landholding features prominently in studies of the late medieval English countryside. Land was the key to wealth, status and power even for peasants; land meant marketing surplus, serving in manorial offices or on juries and employing neighbors, while its lack meant watching others make decisions affecting you and wondering about your survival. The social, cultural and political currents of rural life shaped a peasant’s ability to acquire land through access to credit and pledges, inheritance customs or through machinations of seigneurial or community politics. Thus, scholars have used landholding to examine serfdom, individualism, productivity and standards of living and demographic and economic change. The preponderance of works focus on southern England, mainly the Midlands and East Anglia. The estate, manor and village studies of the latter half of the twentieth century cluster in these areas: Ambrose Raftis and others on Ramsey Abbey, Barbara Harvey on Westminster Abbey, Edward Miller on the Abbey and Bishopric of Ely and, for a West Midlands example, Christopher Dyer on the Bishopric of Worcester. More recent work by John Mullan and Richard Britnell on the Winchester bishopric pipe rolls and Mark Bailey on the decline of serfdom continues this southern focus.1
Northeastern England – the counties of Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire – offers potential for comparative work even though the region was considered backward then and now.2 Agriculture in this region, part of England’s highland zone, was marked by greater pastoralism, different patterns of grain production and less dense settlement than southern England, although agriculture in the lowland areas of the northeast were not that dissimilar from southern manors. Relatively understudied due to few records for the medieval period, the region permits comparison of important economic, geographic and cultural variables, including the role of lordship.3 Little survives for Northumberland, and with exceptions few of the extant records for County Durham and Yorkshire survive in series suitable for long-term analysis; and the more extensive studies of rural medieval Durham have not been published except in excerpts.4 Yet the surviving records for the Durham bishopric and Priory main estate alongside scattered manorial records for lay lords in Durham and northern Yorkshire provide enough data for the post-Black Death period for comparisons with more well-studied areas.
Approaches to the peasant land market
The mechanisms of peasant landholding were important from the beginning of the modern history of rural medieval England and so only the barest summary is offered here.5 F.W. Maitland noted ‘a brisk traffic was done in small parcels of land’ by the unfree tenants of King’s Ripton (Hunts.), and early studies seized upon rentals and surveys to explain peasant tenure under English feudalism.6 After World War II, scholars employing manor court rolls and inspired by the new emphasis on social history uncovered many complexities of English serfdom. As others have noted, the publication of the Carte Nativorum with M.M. Postan’s ‘Introduction’ was a watershed because it revealed unfree peasants involved in the market for free lands.7 Raftis, Rodney Hilton and their many students sought to untangle the complexities of the peasant land market in relation to the social and economic changes in late medieval England, particularly the decline of serfdom. The late medieval elements of the transformation to agrarian capitalism originally were approached in two ways. Postan’s popular Neo-Malthusianism located the impetus of change in the balance of population and resources; others followed the class conflict model associated with Rodney Hilton and Robert Brenner that emphasized the struggle over resources between lord and peasant. Brenner specifically sought to understand why capitalism developed in some European countries while other regions saw a revival of serfdom, and the subsequent ‘Brenner Debate’ revealed how the ‘Neo-Malthusian’ and ‘Marxist’ labels disguised significant interpretations. In the late-twentieth century a third model emerged, centered on the effects of commercialization. Recently, scholars have returned to lord–tenant relations, shifting the chronology of change ever earlier and further blurring the traditional divide between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’.8 Tenure and the land market are critical in all these models, from the need to feed a growing population to conflict over rents and services to the opportunity of marketing produce.
The year 1984 was a banner year for the study of the peasant land market, with The Peasant Land Market in Late Medieval England and Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle.9 The former collection of four studies on Norfolk, Berkshire, Bedfordshire and southeastern Durham originated in unpublished doctoral work from 1962 to 1976. The fifteen essays in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle are oriented toward more demographic topics but still focused on the land market, most often in connection with marriage and death; these were more diverse in chronology, ranging from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Together, these collections demonstrate the difficulty of drawing more than the broadest of conclusions about the land market even within a region.
The 1980s also saw pioneering work on women and gender studies, such as Judith Bennett on peasant women in Brigstock (Northants.) and Mavis Mate on women of different statuses in Sussex.10 While men dominated landholding and the land market, women played important roles particularly as wives and widows and made up a regular if small proportion of the tenantry; in preplague Brigstock, 18% of tenants were women.11 Their position could be tenuous, with custom shifting with economic conditions, as Richard M. Smith found in Cottenham (Cambs.) or Sandy Bardsley found in examining inheritance by women before and after the Black Death.12 The study of gender, alongside other recent topics such as the role of weather or agricultural decision making, has enlarged our understanding of the peasant land market’s dependence not only on economic but also social structures and cultural attitudes.13 New studies returning to earlier debates, such as that by Mullan and Britnell using the Winchester bishopric pipe rolls, or Bailey’s new model and chronology for the decline of serfdom, draw on more than a half-century of economic research and recent work on gender, lordship and local society.14 Yet topics and regions remain unexplored despite acknowledgement of local variations.
Generally, studies of the land market cover three topics – who held what land, units of landholding and the rents and services owed and market dynamics including frequency of transfer and customs governing exchanges – but comparing them is rarely straightforward. Tenures and terminology varied; manors and villages were not necessarily coterminous and could contain a mixture of free and customary land; and even within an estate the common tenurial units (cottages, virgates, bovates, yardlands and husbandlands) could vary in size.15 Moreover, diverse approaches have led historians to mine and sort data differently. The interval of analysis is one example: Dyer and Mullan and Britnell generally used decades, but Whittle used periods of fifteen to twenty-five years, Barbara Harvey employed twenty-year periods and others calculated a single average for a broad period.16 Dichotomies of intra- and extra-familial transfers serve some approaches well, but for other purposes the distinction of land going to a son, daughter, brother or uncle is critical; and there is a choice to include inheritance and postmortem transfers. The chosen approach shapes the interpretation in different ways.
One assumption underlying early analysis of the land market was the emotional connection between a peasant family and ‘its’ land; peasants viewed rights to land as belonging to the family line and not to individuals. Building on work by Alexander Chayanov, many English medievalists followed a life-cycle theory of subsistence-oriented landholding in which a peasant man acquired and shed holdings based on his age and family status – acquiring lands as he began his family, adding more as the family grew and then selling off lands as he aged and no longer needed to (or could not) work them, but holding on to the core holding until passing it to his son.17 Paul Hyams rejected this interpretation in favor of a less natural, competitive approach and Alan MacFarlane went even further by arguing that the land market was evidence of individualism, and a market-based theory has replaced life-cycle and the family-land bond as drivers of the peasant land market.18 This view of the role of individualism and market forces is epitomized by Bruce Campbell’s description of the fourteenth-century peasants of Coltishall (Norf.) as ‘a hard-bargaining and resilient lot, emotionally unattached to their land, and inured to crisis’, who bought and sold as opportunity presented itself.19
Custom and cultural considerations further molded the local land market in response to plague, taxation and lord–peasant relations.20 Even where similarity might be assumed, such as neighboring villages or within a single estate, it was not guaranteed due to seigniorial preferences or the pressures of the community. As Smith and Bonfield and Poos demonstrated, custom was extremely malleable and shaped by local conditions and specific situations; and Miriam Müller has argued that gender relationships in manors need to be addressed locally and regionally.21 Jane Whittle argues for a broad distinction between Midland and East Anglian land markets based on lordship, although Phillipp Schofield has suggested that the origin for Bury St. Edmunds (Suff.) instead lies in the influence of free men buying and selling. Even within large estates, local or regional factors produced significant variations and different chronologies, even among neighboring villages.22 Although generalization is possible, lordship and regionalism did not dictate local economic, social and cultural structures.
The northeast
A selection of examples from the northeast of England not only suggests a possible regional pattern to landholding but also demonstrates the difficulty in assuming that one pattern dominated. As Northumberland has so few extant manorial records, the focus in this chapter is on County Durham and northeastern Yorkshire. In some respects, Durham is well represented, in others less so. Rolls for the bishopric halmote courts, where the steward heard business for more than sixty settlements three times per year, survive with gaps from 1348 into the twentieth century. Three villages represent the estate in the present study, in neighboring parishes; Sedgefield, the largest of the three, with a market; Bishop Middleham, the closest to a ‘typical’ manor; and Cornforth, more a hamlet than a village.23 The Bursar of Durham Priory likewise went on a tour of the main estate in Durham three times per year to oversee thirty-two settlements, represented here by Billingham.24 Both estates contained settlements of different sizes and agricultural orientations; they also preserved elements of an older ‘small shire’ system in which six or twelve settlements owed works at a central demesne farm.25
Five other manors provide a sense of the land market under lay lords: Bolam in County Durham, held by the Earls of Suffolk; and St. Helen’s Auckland (Durham), Daletown and Ingleby Arncliffe (N. Yorks.), held by the Mauleverers of Ingleby Arncliffe in the fifteenth century.26 Where the Durham bishopric and Priory records are extensive, few rolls survive for these manors and often in poor shape; nevertheless they yield data to consider the significance of region, locality and lordship in landholding and the land market.
Northeastern tenures
The most common units of landholding in England were the virgate and yardland, usually of fifteen and thirty acres, respectively; the northeastern analogues were the bovate or oxgang and the bondland or husbandland. The bovate frequently was fifteen acres, but twelve and eighteen acres were common as well. Husbandlands tended to be reckoned in terms of two bovates, but could include a few acres of pasture. These formed the core of the older settlements. Most villages also contained cottages with zero to twelve acres of arable land attached; more recently expanded settlements might contain only cottages and parcels of land. Older categories of tenure persisted into the fifteenth century such malland, which was not freehold but paid lighter rents and services than husbandlands, and dringages, which owed money rents and ‘nobler’ services such as riding escort to the bishop, although some were considered customary land and not freehold and the practical differences were eroding rapidly. Finally, there were small parcels of newly cultivated land, meadow and parcels of demesne.
One of the more striking features of landholding in northeastern England (although not limited to this region) is the durability of the bovates and husbandlands. On the Durham bishopric estate, these holdings remained largely intact up to and in many cases beyond 1500, although husbandlands could be divided into their component bovates.27 Bishopric rentals and surveys reflect the continuity of husbandlands and bovates and even many cotlands. Of the thirty-three settlements with bovates or husbandlands in the twelfth-century record called Boldon Book that also are listed in Hatfield’s Survey, thirty-two are still reckoned in bovates. Of those, thirteen retained the same number as before, four had lost two or fewer bovates and four townships were listed with more bovates in the fourteenth century. On the other hand, five townships had major losses: fourteen of Stanhope’s twenty bovates, eighteen of Ryhope’s fifty-four, fifteen of Darlington’s forty-eight, fourteen of Bishop Wearmouth’s forty-four and nine of Whickham’s forty-five are not listed as such in Hatfield’s Survey. Some may have been converted to free land but most must have been broken up.28 The only two settlements with fragmented bovates in may have been that way in the twelfth century: according to Boldon Book, Ryton and Wolsingham had been leased out and the organization of lands is not stated. Apparently, demesne land and assarts satisfied the demand of bishopric tenants for small parcels; and expansion of settlement in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is clear.29 The transfers recorded in the bishopric courts continued to reflect this tendency up to the end of the Middle Ages, and even in the middle of the seventeenth century the oxgang and husbandland remained common units.30
The villages on the Priory main estate were much more varied, with holdings remaining intact in some villages in 1340 though in others such as West Rainton ‘the break-up of the original tenements was extensive’.31 At the end of the fourteenth century, whole tenures persisted in villages such as Newton Bewley, Southwick and Aycliffe alongside holdings of varying size.32 By the midfifteenth century, accumulation was replacing fragmentation and eventually many villages were leased to syndicates.33
The smaller manors also maintained their earlier organization. In a 1398 rental for St. Helen’s Auckland, most tenements appear complete: six freeholds of eighteen, twenty, twenty-four and forty acres; nineteen husbandlands of twelve, fifteen, eighteen or twenty-four; seventeen cottages, four of which included arable land (two with six acres); a place on Le Grene; two acres of meadow; and the manor buildings and demesne, as a single holding.34 A 1430 rental for Daletown lists the acreage for only six of the twenty-seven holdings; five of those contain one or more bovates and the other is a messuage with three acres. Of the remaining, six are cottages (one with a parcel of land), three are parcels of meadow, one is the buildings of the manor itself and the remaining eleven are listed as messuages or tenements with no mention of land.35 Unfortunately there is no rental for Bolam, although a court roll for 1435 lists seventeen free and eleven ‘at will’ tenants; the frequency with which ten/twenty and twelve/twenty-four acres appears would suggest that these may have been the original units of land, but if so only nine holdings were still intact; the smallest ‘at will’ tenancies were both of five acres.36 Whole tenures were taken up in St. Helen’s Auckland in 1402, in Ingleby Arncliffe in 1445 and Daletown in 1514–15, indicating a pattern similar to the Durham bishopric.37
This pattern contrasts with East Anglia, where the rising population led to the fragmentation of holdings in the twelfth and thirteenth century.38 In his study of the 1279 Hundred Rolls, E.A. Kosminsky observed that 46% of tenants held fewer than ten acres, and many held fewer than five.39 In Gressenahll (Norf.), the average holding in 1282 was likely smaller than five and one-half acres, and in Martham ‘[t]he 104 tenements of the early thirteenth century were broken up into over 900 smaller units’ by 1292.40 In Redgrave (Suff.) ‘almost 30% of holdings [were] less than one acre in size’.41 Elsewhere, fragmentation proceeded more slowly and was initiated or accelerated by the Black Death; Halesowen (Worcs.) and Kibworth Harcourt (Leics.) experienced division of holdings after the Black Death; it varied on the Winchester bishopric manors; and while the virgate and half-virgate disappeared on some Westminster Abbey manors, others experienced very little division of holdings up to the end of the Middle Ages.42 Although not unknown elsewhere, the retention of whole bovates and husbandlands (as well as cotlands) in the northeast stands out. In many villages, the demand for land was met by small parcels of assarted land, demesne lands, access to waste lands and moor and through subletting of the main holdings, and still lands lay vacant in the lord’s hand.43 As subletting was common elsewhere, low demand also may lay behind the lack of fragmentation of holdings in so many northeastern villages.44
Land and status
Until serfdom declined, unfree or customary lands possessed a stigma because tenants owed servile services and dues such as weekwork and merchet. As England’s population increased in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, lords allowed their unfree tenants to buy themselves out of these impositions and the process became permanent in the population decline then stagnation in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, eventually transforming unfree tenures into heritable copyhold and leasehold; and Leigh Shaw-Taylor observed that later agrarian capitalism can be mapped onto Britnell’s medieval commercialization patterns.45 Bailey locates the key transitions of serf to free and customary land to copy- and leasehold in the last decades of the fourteenth century and posits four criteria: the disappearance of labor services and levies such as merchet and suit of mill; the issue of a copy of the court roll as proof of right; the omission of language in the conveyance relating to servility; and the emergence of fixed-term tenures.46 These criteria do not fit the northeastern evidence, in large part because serfdom by blood predominated and personal status did not correlate with tenure.47 Second, the copy of the court roll was in place by 1349 in the bishopric of Durham, and the phrase ‘according to the custom of the court’ (secundum consuetudinem curiae) was in use in Ingleby Arncliffe in 1377 and in the bishopric by 1401.48 Customary land was heritable; in the fourteenth century, the records merely stated that a tenant held ‘in right’ (in jure) and deceased tenants often were noted as having held ‘in right while s/he lived’ (in jure dum vixit).49 Leasing of customary land also emerged early; Durham Priory began offering leases for customary land in the 1360s and this had become widespread by 1400.50 Leasehold developed later in the bishopric, appearing in the 1390s with standard six and twelve year terms by 1399; while most villages used a mixture of copyhold and leasehold, a few such as Cornforth took to leasing as standard.51 Leases were common in Bolam and St. Helen’s Auckland, with a usual three-year term.52 In some Bedfordshire manors, Jones observed copyhold for years and for inheritance emerging in the 1370s and 1380s, but many of the elements of copyhold appear to have been in place in the northeast significantly earlier, possibly before the Black Death.53
The issue is not with the model; rather it highlights the variation in medieval England, of which Bailey is aware: ‘[t]he timing and local geography of late medieval tenurial change is still only vaguely known’.54 While the transformation to copyhold and leasehold in the south is connected to the decline of serfdom, in the northeast different factors were responsible as lords were employing some labor services and controlling serfs after copyhold and leasehold emerged. Durham Priory tracked nativi from 1378 to 1470; and statements declaring that all the goods of the nativi were seised into the lord’s hand appeared at the top of court rolls for Bolam in November of 1396, 1397, and 1403–05, and Durham Priory in 1420–21.55 Durham Priory was collecting merchet (a marriage fine) from tenants as late as 1487.56 Tenurially the northeast was leaving the Middle Ages behind more quickly than the south, but serfdom and other medieval elements persisted.
The land market in northeastern England
The fragmentation of holdings reflected the balance between hunger for land and seigniorial and communal attitudes. Intact holdings made it easier for lords to extract labor services, but entry fines offered cash income; community members had diverse reasons for and against division of holdings based on their perceived self-interest, whether individual, familial or communal.57 In the northeast, the preference for intact holdings would seem to correlate with a very slow market, and Timothy Lomas remarked on the apparent sluggishness of the land market in southeast Durham. However, whether or not a land market was ‘brisk’ rests on more than the number of transactions in a given period: population size, the availability of lands (including waste and potential assarts) and communal and seigniorial concerns.58 The court records frequently contain memoranda on lands in the lord’s hand for want of tenants, and except in periods of high mortality, two to four transfers per annum was not uncommon in a northeastern village or manor. Bishop Middleham in southeast Durham averaged 4.8 transfers per annum from 1349 to 1362 and 3.6 per annum from 1388 to 1500, rising into double digits only six years between 1349 and 1500; this includes postmortem inheritance and widow-right. Neighboring Cornforth had an even slower market: a mean of 0.9 transfers from 1349 to 1362, 1.9 between 1388 and 1424 and 1.05 from 1439 to 1500.59 Sampling of the rest of the estate yields annual village rates from 0 to 5.8 transfers per annum for the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.60 The land market peaked in the decades around 1400 and then slumped until the close of the century. In the Priory village of Billingham, the mean for the later fourteenth century was 3.9 transfers per annum, but the rate declined as the century wore on to 3.0 transfers in the last decade. Billingham in the later fifteenth century experienced a similar feast-or-famine land market to Cornforth: in the accounting year of 1465–66, six men renewed leases and two made new leases, while other years often have only one or two.61 These rates are not out of line with many of the southern manors and estates. Zvi Razi aggregated the Halesowen land market by decade, and his numbers average out to between 2.6 and 5.9 transfers per annum for the period from 1351 to 1420.62 Converting Harvey’s results for Westminster Abbey yields annual means of 0.2 to 1.7 transfers from 1280 to 1549, unsurprising given the monks’ resistance to dividing holdings. Winchester bishopric rates were higher, peaking at an average of 12.2 per year from 1340 to 1349 while reaching a low of 3.8 per year from 1400 to 1409, but in some manors the rates were much higher in the decade following the Black Death.63 In Coltishall although the mean varied there often were five or more transactions per court, while in Brigstock there were 620 transactions in the sampled period of twelve years.64 The rates in Durham were consistent with those of several other estates and manors, but significantly slower than in Brigstock and most preplague Winchester manors, though all of these need to be adjusted for relative population size.
Furthermore, Cornforth exemplifies one challenge in studying the late medieval land market. Unlike Bishop Middleham, the tenants of Cornforth preferred leasing and most tenants renewed leases together. Fourteen men leased land or renewed leases in 1476, then thirteen in 1488.65 Clusters of leasing like this can be found in other bishopric villages, although usually the tenant took up a new set of lands, as in Midrigge in 1406 where twelve tenants leased land for three-year terms.66 In Ingleby Arncliffe there was a similar pattern of collective renewal, although not as universal as in Cornforth: in 1433, eleven men renewed their three years leases for bovates while another ten made new leases for cottages; in 1462 there were fifteen leases of cottages or bovates, eight of which were clearly new leases; and in 1488, there were eighteen leases of three and nine years.67 Renewals were not always common; although there were occasional renewals recorded in Daletown from 1429 to1443 and 1458 to 1471 most demises noted the land as previously held by another.68 The preference of tenants to take or renew leases at the same time, such as when Thomas Skogall, John Gybson, Henry Hode and eleven other men of Sedgefield, Durham renewed or traded leases in the same court in March 1462, is responsible for some of the low rates of transfer in some samples.69
Combined with patchy records, the practice of leasing erases important contours of the market such as the actual turnover rate. Dyer and Poos among others have noted that on average all the holdings in a given market would turn over in a ten to fifteen year period.70 Turnover cannot be calculated reliably for the northeast, but it may have been similar. Bishop Middleham contained forty holdings circa 1383, and with an average of just under four transactions per annum the potential turnover rate would be similar to what Dyer and Poos found. In a village such as Cornforth where leasing became the norm, the surviving records suggests a potential turnover rate of six years, if every tenant leased new lands when the term was out. The low level of population in the northeast combined with the availability of land suggest low demand, exacerbated by poor economic conditions or lack of demand for agricultural produce. For the conditions in the northeast, four transactions per year on average may have been, relatively, brisk; as with many factors in understanding the land market, local context is significant.
Rents and fines
The level of rent rose slowly in the northeast following the commutation of labor services and rents in kind.71 Husbandmen in Bishop Middleham commuted their obligations for an annual payment of 15s. 4d. and in Cornforth for 13s. 10d. q. Cotlands normally had rents of one or two shillings but this could vary greatly.72 In some cases, stated rents in the fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries were lower than in Hatfield’s Survey, for the entire term or temporarily in exchange for repairs; for example, in 1422, John Raynald took up a husbandland in Bishop Middleham after the death of the previous tenant for 13s. 6d. per annum, or 1s. 10d. below the standard rent.73 By 1500, rents had risen 46% to 21s. 8d. for a husbandland in Bishop Middleham.74 Rents for other holdings mirrored the general trends for husbandlands, but the lack of data due to clerical use of ‘as before’ and ‘the old rent’ makes tracking this difficult.75 Surviving Durham Priory rentals show stable rents for main holdings in the fourteenth century for villages such as Newton Bewley, often at higher rates that in neighboring bishopric villages; a toft and thirty acres commanded a rent of 30s., and a cottage and three acres, 3s.76 In other Priory villages the fragmentation of holdings prevents drawing of general conclusions, partly because it is difficult to match specific parcels. For example, in Wolviston in 1340–41, Thomas de Etton paid 3s. 4d. in rent for one toft and thirty-four acres while John de Bellasis paid 5s. for another holding that size, but Robert Ayre paid only 4s. 9d. ob. for a toft and forty-eight acres; fifty-six years later, John Casson owed 7s. 6d. in rent for a toft and thirty-four acres and a holding with a toft and forty acres required 20s. in rent from Thomas Wilkinson.77 Rents changed, as did parcels, and it is not clear how much was due to policy versus individual agreements with a potential tenant. R.A. Lomas found that rent income on paper on the Priory main estate rose after the Black Death but so did arrears and bad debts.78 For Bolam, St. Helen’s Auckland, Ingleby Arncliffe and Daletown, the few surviving records yield little rent data, but generally, rents remained around 1s. per acre for husbandlands and 2 or 3s. for a cotland.
Rents were not the only feature of the land market to remain low; the entry fine (gressuma) paid by the new tenant on taking up a holding remained at low levels or disappeared entirely. The court clerks recorded entry fines much more regularly than rents, permitting clearer observation of trends. Durham bishopric entry fines peaked around 1400 and then began a steep decline so that by the middle of the fifteenth century the average fines were only 10% of what they had been.79 William Heighington of Sedgefield, Durham paid a fine of 10s. to take a husbandland and seven additional acres in 1391, and when he surrendered the husbandland in favor of Hugh Couper in 1419, Hugh paid only 1s.; hat may seem extreme, but the average entry fine for a husbandland in that parish dropped from just under 9s. in the 1390s to just under 1s. in the 1460s.80 Leasehold entry fines were lower than for copyhold on the bishopric, usually sixpence no matter the seize of the holding, while the Priory eventually eliminated them for leasehold altogether, and those that were levied often were reduced or waived.81
More than simple supply-and-demand drove rent and fine levels; as R.W. Hoyle pointed out, custom often tied the lords’ hands.82 Rents and fines could be reduced as a reward, to cover repairs or to induce a desirable person to take up a holding. Cultural values could affect rents, too, as could the dynamic between landlord and tenants; Müller sees entry fines on Brandon potentially as a symbolic reminder of villeinage.83 Rents and fines in the northeast were not always tied to the real value of the land but often set by custom, particularly in villages retaining the older husbandland structure, and entry fines usually were lower than the year’s rent often assessed elsewhere in England. There were vacant holdings for the taking; with low rents and fines, northeastern peasants had the chance to accumulate lands if they had the capital, the pledges and the desire.
Accumulation of holdings
One significant element of northeastern land markets examined here is the traffic in whole bovates and husbandlands, not small parcels. Edwin DeWindt noted the ‘smallhold nature of the land market’ in Holywell-cum-Needingworth, and most Brigstock transactions were of fewer than two rods.84 In Blunham (Bedfords.), four-fifths of the land transfers between 1413 and 1457 were for parcels and over time the proportion became larger, while in the village of Arlesey three-quarters of lands transferred were smaller than ten acres. In contrast, on some nearby Ramsey Abbey manors transfers of half-virgates and virgates predominated, similar to the northeastern evidence.85 In some villages, there were fewer transactions after the Black Death, but the amount of land involved was larger.86
Northeastern court clerks often omitted acreage in favor of reference to ‘tenures’, ‘total tenures’, parcels, closes and so on. Excluding instances of widow-right, only forty-seven transactions of arable in Bishop Middleham and Cornforth from 1349 to 1500 noted acreage; twenty-five were bovate- or husbandland-sized, and only four were for more than two bovates in a single transaction. A sampling of arable transfers for the rest of the bishopric, including transactions with no stated acreage, shows that a third of transfers were for whole bovates and husbandlands and another third for parcels, with the remainder split between cotlands and ‘total tenures’.87 The proportions varied within the county: in the more manorialized lowland south and east the tenement structure was stronger with most transactions reckoned in bovates; in the highland north and west, less manorialized and more recently colonized, there was a more marked trade in parcels and closes.88 The exchanges in Ingleby Arncliffe, Daletown, Bolam and St. Helen’s Auckland were usually for entire holdings and rarely were more than two bovates exchanged in a single transaction. The exchanges on the Durham Priory estate were much more varied, with more small transfers especially in the fourteenth century.89
Accumulation was limited even in holdings passed on after death. A study of widow-right in Bishop Middleham parish shows that the average holding taken by a widow was sixteen acres in the fourteenth century, and only twenty-five acres in the fifteenth century.90 Hatfield’s Survey shows initial engrossment in some bishopric villages following the Black Death, including double husbandlands. Likewise it was not uncommon to find elite Priory villagers holding forty-five to sixty acres, but men such as Gilbert Spurnhare with his sixteen cottages and more than 150 acres in Billingham were rare.91 Timothy Lomas found that no tenant in south-east Durham was involved in more than six land transactions and similar patterns appear to hold in other Durham villages as well, echoing experiences observed in some southern villages.92 In Bishop Middleham, from 1388 to 1423 seventy of eighty-eight people active in the land market were involved in more than one transfer, and in Sedgefield it was thirty-three of 182 (excluding lease renewals).93 Some aggregated holdings were handed down; the seventy-one acres Thomas de Hedlam of Sedgefield accumulated passed to his widow in 1406 or 1407 and to their son in 1443, and were still in the family in 1569.94 There was greater consolidation on the Priory estate, where Timothy Lomas found that the number of tenants shrank by a third by the end of the fifteenth century.95 But composite holdings often broke up in the tenant’s life time or at his death, similar to Faith’s observation for Coleshill (Berks.) of ‘the rise of a peasant aristocracy which came to nothing’.96 A village elite was emerging in the northeast, but as a subset of the husbandmen of a village rather than a new stratum. True peasant accumulation only began late in the fifteenth century.97
Although few individuals acquired significant holdings, groups of tenants and entire villages did engage with the Durham land markets. The bishop’s steward leased villages out first to one or two lessees and later to jurors or representatives of the village itself; between 1400 and 1500, sixteen bishopric vills were leased; for example, Tunstall being leased four times between 1446 and 1468, and Cassop seven times between 1413 and 1489.98 This was an extension of earlier collective leases of vacant lands and demesne. Some leases were discounted, but others approximated the total rent found in Hatfield’s Survey.99 On the Priory main estate, syndicates became common in the fifteenth century, with tenants coming together to lease their village; this simplified rent collection for the Priory and was ‘an official recognition of the redistribution of the land after the Black Death’.100 Until the later fifteenth century, collective tenure and double-husbandmen were common but ever-shifting parts of the northeastern landscape, and when more permanent accumulation began it would be through taking up of demesne parcels, meadows and cotlands rather than consolidation of customary arable land.
The family-land bond question
Historians have concluded that any family-land bond in late medieval England was weak, as measured by the frequency of conveyances and sales outside the family. That weakness became apparent in the aftermath of the Black Death when peasants could add or shed lands more readily, and once population began rising the trend reversed. Emotional attachment to land had little effect on peasant decisions.101 The land market in Bishop Middleham parish appears to be a classic case of this weak late medieval bond. From 1388 to 1489, inter vivos transfers within the family never rose above 10% of transactions for any given decade, and leasing contributed to the weakening. However, this period also was marked by regular reports of lands in the lord’s hand for want of tenants, as was the case throughout England.102 Families were dying out; excluding widow-right, only one-fifth of lands went to a family member after the death of the tenant. As Mullan and Britnell suggested, increased mortality or decreased fertility was also a factor in the apparent weakening bond.103
Conclusions
Little in the northeastern land markets has not been seen elsewhere, except the early and widespread practice of copyhold. A number of factors stand out from the majority of studies: the persistence of older tenurial structures, with low fixed rents and a possibly slow market. Even these were not universal; the Durham Priory villages complicate a regional generalization at the same time the upland bishopric villages suggest a potential subregional pattern. Yet the difficulty of generalizing from these examples permits consideration of arguments regarding tenure and the land market.
First, two factors noted for other manors do not seem to be major influence in the northeast: inheritance practices and poverty. Partible inheritance has been proffered as one explanation for the precocity of the East Anglia; custom permitted families to endow multiple children, resulting in ever-shrinking holdings as the population grew. Williamson rejects that argument, noting that even in areas of impartible inheritance ‘tenants generally seem to have used their land to provide for as many of the immediate family as possible’, while in areas practicing partible inheritance the market could compensate for the vagaries of inheritance.104 In the northeast, tenements were impartible and after the widow the right went to the eldest son, and in the case of only daughters they would have joint tenancy; if a tenant had more than one holding then the nearest heir could take one and decline the others, giving his siblings an opportunity for a holding. That could contribute to the pace in some markets but not others. Likewise, leasehold may have been an impetus for greater market activity yet both bishopric and Priory estates had mixed results.
A third proposed factor is lordship. Raftis remarked on the ‘indifferen[ce]’ of lords as necessary for villeins to trade in customary land, while Barbara Harvey noted the ‘strong and enduring hostility to the piecemeal fragmentation’ by the monks of Westminster Abbey and Whittle argued that strong lordship in the Midlands prevented fragmentation while the weaker or permissive lords of East Anglia allowed holdings to be broken up and thus created an active market.105 Schofield rejected the regional lordship pattern using Bury St. Edmunds; instead, he looks at the presence of free men and argues that ‘[t]he large numbers of liberi homines … may therefore have helped establish a strong and persistent culture of land transfer which seeped into the economic life of other groups of villagers’.106 It is possible that the underlying social and tenurial structures explain the different styles of lordship, too, and not just the land market. A combined interaction of lord, community and structures offers a more satisfying if more complicated method of understanding landholding and the land market. This could explain the variation in northeastern villages. Those villages that were the most manorialized were less likely to fragment. As the Durham bishopric and Priory courts met only three times each year and surviving records for the other manors in this study display similar schedules, village communities would have developed a capacity for self-governance; the bishopric villages had strong communities in the later fourteenth century, successfully foiling Bishop Hatfield’s ‘feudal reaction’, while many Priory villages were riven by faction and strife.107 This is an incomplete explanation, but a mixture of traditionalism/independence with solidarity/faction provides a better fit than lordship or regionalism.
Schofield’s turn to social and cultural influences suggests another way forward, and the relation of gender practices to landholding deserves further work. It is possible that there has been too much emphasis on the Black Death and the rise of capitalism in approaching the medieval land market. There are too many differences even within estates to craft formulae of transition and the practice of copyhold on northeastern estates more than a century before lords abandoned serfdom undercuts a direct connection with the decline of serfdom. Medieval English land markets were complex and the northeastern evidence here demonstrates that their study requires more than economic and demographic analyses of southern English manors.
Notes
1. J.A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974); Barbara Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Clarendon Press, 1977); Edward Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely: The Social History of an Ecclesiastical Estate from the Tenth Century to the Early Fourteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1951); Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Another southern example although different is John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1970); John Mullan and Richard Britnell, Land and Family: Trends and Local Variations in the Peasant Land Market on the Winchester Bishopric Estates, 1263-1415 (University of Hertfordshire, 2010); Mark Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Boydell Press, 2014).
2. H.M. Jewell, The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester University Press, 1994). An example of modern views of the north: ‘to the gentle southerner… the whole province was a wild savage country, its inhabitants primitive in their passions and morals, and entirely without understanding of the rules of a law-abiding society,’ Joan Thirsk, ‘The Farming Regions of England B: The Northern Province,’ in H.P.R. Finberg, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales vol. IV. 1500-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 16.
3. The poor survival of northern court rolls is reflected in Judith Cripps, Rodney Hilton and Janet Williamson, ‘Appendix: A Survey of Manorial Court Rolls in England,’ in Zvi Razi and R.M. Smith, eds., Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Clarendon Press, 1996), 569–637.
4. Richard A. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory as a Landowner and a Landlord, 1290–1540,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 1973; Timothy Lomas, ‘Land and People in South-East Durham in the Later Middle Ages,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Teesside Polytechnic University, 1976. For the postmedieval period, there is John Clifford, ‘Settlement and Field Systems in Middleham Manor, 1600-1850,’ unpublished M.A. thesis, Durham University, 1977.
5. For further information, see Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200-1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). On models of economic change, see John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, Modelling the Middle Ages: The History & Theory of England’s Economic Development (Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. F.W. Maitland, ed., Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Volume I: The Reigns of Henry III and Edward I. Selden Society 2 (B. Quartich, 1889), 105.
7. C.N.L. Brooke and M.M. Postan, eds., Carte Nativorum: A Peterborough Cartulary of the Fourteenth Century, Northamptonshire Record Office 20 (Oxford University Press, 1960);P.D.A. Harvey, ed., The Peasant Land Market in Late Medieval England (Clarendon Press, 1984), 4–5; Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 2.
8. Brenner’s original article and the responses were published as T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1985). See R.H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000-1500, 2nd ed. (Manchester University Press, 1996); Maryanne Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Exeter (Cambridge University Press, 1995); James Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150-1350 (St. Martin’s, 1997); Bailey, Decline of Serfdom; and Jane Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440-1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (Boydell Press, 2013).
9. Harvey, ed., Peasant Land Market; R.M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cyle (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
10. Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (Oxford University Press, 1987); Mavis Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350-1535 (Boydell Press, 1998).
11. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, 33.
12. R.M. Smith, ‘Some Thoughts on ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Proprietary’ Rights in Land under Customary Law in Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century England,’ Law and History Review 1 (1983), 123–6; see also his ‘Coping with uncertainty,’ and Jack Ravensdale, ‘The Transfer of Customary Land,’ in Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 197–225. L.R. Poos and Lloyd Bonfield include a discussion of custom and customary law that includes the balance of general principle with contingent factors: Select Cases in Manorial Courts 1250-1550: Property and Family Law, Selden Society vol. 114 (Selden Society, 1998), xxvii–xxxv; Sandy Bardsley, ‘Peasant Women and Inheritance of Land in Fourteenth-Century England,’ Continuity & Change 29 (2014), 297–324.
13. For example, David Stone, Decision Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford University Press, 2005); Ben Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Boydell Press, 2007); and works by Bruce M.S. Campbell, such as ‘Grain Yields on English Demesnes after the Black Death,’ in Mark Bailey and S.H. Rigby, eds., Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death: Essays in Honour of John Hatcher (Brepols, 2012), 121–74, and others.
14. Recently, Spencer Dimmock has returned to the Brenner Debate with a study of landholding in Kent: The Origin of Capitalism in England 1400-1600 (Brill, 2014).
15. In Whickham, Durham, bovates of customary land contained fifteen acres but bovates of demesne contained only nine: William Greenwell, ed., Bishop Hatfield’s Survey, Surtees Society 32 (George Andrews, 1857; reprinted Dawson & Sons, 1967), 94.
16. Jane Whittle, ‘Individualism and the Family-Land Bond: A Reassessment of Land Transfer Patterns Among the English Peasantry c. 1270-1580,’ in Past and Present 160 (1998), 33, 45; Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 89; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 302; Harvey, Westminster Abbey, 324; Andrew Jones, ‘Bedfordshire: Fifteenth Century,’ in Harvey, ed., The Peasant Land Market, 271; Timothy Lomas, ‘South-East Durham: Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in idem, 297–8; and Edwin Breezette DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1971), 134.
17. A.V. Chayanov, ‘Peasant Farm Organization,’ in The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. by D. Thorner, B. Kerblay, and R.E.F. Smith (University of Wisconsin, 1966), 107–13; for an example of the application of those ideas, see Postan, ‘The Charters of the Villeins,’ and Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 123; cf. Miriam Müller, ‘Peasants, Lords and Developments in Leasing,’ in Phillipp Schofield and Bas van Bavel, eds., The Development of Leasehold in northwestern Europe c. 1200 – 1600, Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area 10(Brepols, 2009), 160–1.
18. Paul R. Hyams, ‘The Origins of a Peasant Land Market in England,’ Economic History Review 2nd ser. 23 (1970), 18–31; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford University Press, 1978); Richard M. Smith, ‘Some Issues Concerning Families and Their Property in Rural England 1250-1800,’ in idem, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 1–86.
19. Campbell, ‘Population Pressure, Inheritance and the Land Market in a Fourteenth-Century Peasant Community,’ in Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 129.
20. For an overview see Schofield, Peasant and Community, 57–76.
21. R.M. Smith, ‘Some Thoughts on the ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Proprietary’ Rights in Land under Customary Law in Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century England,’ Law and History Review 1 (1983), 125–7; Poos and Bonfield, eds., Select Cases; Miriam Müller, ‘Peasant Women, Agency and Status in Mid-Thirteenth to Late Fourteenth-Century England: Some Reconsiderations,’ in Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens, eds., Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe (Boydell Press, 2013), 112.
22. Whittle, ‘Individualism,’ and The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk 1440-1580 (Oxford, 2000); Schofield, ‘Lordship and the Early History of Peasant Land Transfer on the Estates of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds,’ in Maryanne Kowaleski, John Langdon, and idem, eds., Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy: Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell. The Medieval Countryside, vol. 16 (Brepols, 2015), 201–24. Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 154–7; see also Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory;’ and Peter L. Larson, Conflict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1349-1400 (Routledge, 2006). Schofield, Peasant and Community, 56–7.
23. A database of land transactions for these villages from 1348 to 1662 was built from The National Archive: Public Record Office, Kew, London, Palatinate of Durham: Chancery Court: Cursitor’s Records: Halmote Court Books (hereafter TNA: PRO) DURH 3/12-28, and Durham University Library, Special Collections, Durham Bishopric Halmote Records: Court Books 1/I/73-78; hereafter ‘Durham Land Market Database.’
24. Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, No. 5 The College, Durham: Durham Cathedral Muniments (DCM) Halm. Roll 1358–509, Priory Halmote Rolls. R. Lomas produced an estate study of the Priory in ‘Durham Cathedral Priory.’
25. Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 36, 41; J.E.A. Jolliffe, ‘Northumbrian Institutions,’ English Historical Review 41 (1926), 11–2; and Rosamond Faith, English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester University Press, 1997), esp. 9–10, 122.
26. North Yorkshire County Record Office, Northallerton, North Yorkshire: ZFL 107–15, 123–6, 129 (microfilms 1290–91), ZJB 2/1-5 (microfilm 2383).
27. Similar to Holywell-cum-Needingworth: DeWindt, Land and People, 41–54.
28. Dan Austin, ed., Boldon Book: Northumberland and Durham, Domesday Book Supplementary Volume 35 (Phillimore, 1982), 10–71. Bishop Hatfield’s Survey, 1–198.
29. While some exchequerland must have come from broken up tenures, much came from assarting: Helen Dunsford and Simon Harris, ‘Colonization of the Wasteland in County Durham, 1100-1400,’ Economic History Review 2nd ser. 56 (2003), 41–6.
30. David A. Kirby, ed., The Parliamentary Surveys of the Bishopric of Durham, 2 vols., Surtees Society 183, 185 (Northumberland Press, 1971, 1972).
31. R.A. Lomas, ‘Developments in Land and Tenure on the Prior of Durham’s Estate in the Later Middle Ages,’ Northern History 13 (1977), 31–3; R.A. Lomas and A.J. Piper, eds., Durham Cathedral Priory Rentals, volume I: Bursars’ Rentals, Surtees Society 198 (Athenaeum Press, 1989), 31–70.
32. Bursars’ Rentals, 71–128.
33. Lomas, ‘Developments in Land and Tenure,’ 31–3, 35–9.
34. NYCRO, ZFL 129 m. 1. NYCRO.
35. NYCRO, ZFL 124 m. 21; ZFL 124. A partial rental from 1468 seems to indicate that holdings are still intact, although the rental seems more concerned with buildings and rent: ZFL 125 mm, 35–6.
36. NYCRO, ZJB 2/5.
37. NYCRO, ZFL 126 mm. 50, 52.
38. Hyams, ‘Origins of a Peasant Land Market,’ 18–31; Campbell, ‘Population Pressure,’ 87–134; R.M. Smith, ‘Families and Their Land in an Area of Partible Inheritance: Redgrave, Suffolk 1260-1320,’ in Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 139–40.
39. E.A. Kosminksy, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, trans. Ruth Kisch (Kelley & Millman, 1956), 216, 223.
40. Janet Williamson, ‘Norfolk: Thirteenth Century,’ in Harvey, ed., Peasant Land Market, 53, 69.
41. Smith, ‘Families and Their Land,’ 142.
42. Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270-1400 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5–9; Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 37–56, 152–3; Mark Page, ‘The Peasant Land Market on the Estate of the Bishopric of Winchester Before the Black Death,’ in Richard Britnell, ed., The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society (Boydell Press, 2003), 61–80. Harvey, Westminster Abbey, 206–7.
43. Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 146, 201–2. On subletting see Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (Routledge, 1969), 50–1.
44. Jones, ‘Bedfordshire,’ 193; Raftis, Tenure and Mobility,74–81.
45. Shaw-Taylor, ‘The Rise of Agrarian Capitalism and the Decline of Family Farming in England,’ Economic History Review 65 (2012), 27–33, 58.
46. Bailey, Decline of Serfdom, 87–95 and ‘The Transformation of Customary Tenures in Southern England, c. 1350 to c. 1500,’ Agricultural History Review 62 (2014), 213–5, 299.
47. Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 62–7, 91–4, 102–3, 156–8.
48. NYCRO, ZFL 107 2v; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 62–7, 91–4, 102–3.
49. For example see TNA: PRO DURH 3/13 f. 4v.
50. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 24–5, 30–5, 40–5, and ‘Developments in Land and Tenure,’ 37–9; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 167; A.T. Brown, Rural Society and Economic Change in County Durham: Recession and Recovery, c. 1400-1640 (Boydell Press, 2015), 45.
51. TNA: PRO DURH 3/13 f. 99v. The development of leasehold frequently was contingent on power relations between lord and tenants: Edward Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely, 104–5; Harvey, Westminster Abbey, esp. 246–56 and 273–4; Müller, ‘Peasants, Lords and Developments in Leasing,’ 164–6 in Schofield and van Bavel, eds., The Development of Leasehold, 155–78. Brown, Rural Society and Economic Change, 37–56; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 162–7.
52. NYCRO, ZJB 2/1-5; ZFL 129.
53. Jones, ‘Bedfordshire,’ 192.
54. Bailey, ‘Transformation of Customary Tenures,’ 229.
55. ZFB 2/1-3; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 157–8, 210.
56. DCM Priory Halmote Rolls, spring 1487, m. 1.
57. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1941; reprinted Russell and Russell, 1960), 195–202; Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 36–57; Phillipp Schofield, Peasant and Community, 69–76.
58. Lomas, ‘Land and People,’ 131–8.
59. ‘Durham Land Market Database.’
60. TNA: PRO DURH 3/12 ff. 133r–153v; 3/13 ff. 191rr–222r; 3/14 ff. 13r–47r, 381r–414v, 629r–637r; 3/15 ff. 23r–42v, 227r–246v; 3/16 ff. 53r–72v, 175r–194r; 3/17 ff. 35r–45v; 3/18 ff. 44r–64v; 3/19 ff. 92v–119v.
61. DCM Priory Halmote Rolls Autumn 1465 m. 1, spring 1466 m. 1, summer 1466 m. 1.
62. Zvi Razi, ‘The Erosion of the Family-Land Bond in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: A Methodological Note,’ in Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 297.
63. Based on data in, ‘Table 6.1: Proportions of intrafamilial and extrafamilial transfers by decade, 1320-1415,’ divided by the number of manors: Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 89; John Mullan, ‘The Transfer of Customary Land on the Estates of the Bishop of Winchester Between the Black Death and the Plague of 1361,’ in Britnell, ed., Winchester Pipe Rolls, 85.
64. Campbell, ‘Population Pressure,’ 107–9; Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, 33–5, 216–7.
65. TNA: PRO DURH 3/16 ff. 10v–311r; 3/18 f. 51r–v.
66. PRO DURH 3/14 19r.
67. NYCRO, ZFL 109/1 m. 3; ZFL 110 m. 2; ZFL 111 m. 11d.
68. NYCRO, ZFL 124–6.
69. TNA: PRO DURH 3/16 ff. 92v–93r.
70. Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 301, regarding the fifteenth century; L.R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113, for 1351–89.
71. Whittle notes that leasehold rents were lower on many estates in the fifteenth century but rose in the sixteenth: ‘Leasehold tenure in England c. 1300-c. 1600: its form and incidence,’ in von Bavel and Schofield, eds., The Development of Leasehold, 143. See also Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, 69, 112.
72. Bishop Hatfield’s Survey, 182–92.
73. TNA: PRO DURH 3/14 f. 598r.
74. ‘Durham Land Market Database.’
75. For example, three demesne meadows attached to Middleham manor, Edmondsmedowe, Newmedowe, and Grangemedowe, were worth 96s. 6d. in Bishop Hatfield’s Survey but only 40s. in 1488, although the latter lease was held by the bishop’s instaurer and so his rent may not reflect either the market or traditional rate: Bishop Hatfield’s Survey, 183; TNA: PRO DURH 3/18 f. 50v; Durham University Library Archives and Special Collections, Palace Green, Church Commission Durham Bishopric deposit: Financial material to 1649, B/73/9 (188815) Bailiff of the Bailiwicks.
76. Bursars’ Rentals,49–50 and 104–5.
77. Ibid, 50–1 and 106–8.
78. R.A. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 100–11; Brown, Rural Society and Economic Change, 33–9.
79. ‘Durham Land Market Database.’ Entry fines would not return to earlier levels until the 1520s and 1530s, as seen elsewhere: Christopher Dyer, ‘The Agrarian Problem, 1440-1520,’ in Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 24–5 and Lords and Peasants, 287–91; J.M.W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family 1416-1537 (Oxford University Press, 1958), 51–67, 138–40; Whittle found rises from 144–68 to 1556–74: Development of Agrarian Capitalism, 79–80.
80. TNA: PRO DURH 3/13 ff. 35r–493v, 3/14 ff. 8v–502r, 3/16 ff. 131r–177r. For Heighington specifically see 3/13 f. 35r; for Couper, 3/14 f. 482v.
81. Lomas, ‘South-East Durham,’ 308, and ‘Land and People in South-East Durham,’ 142–4; R.A. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 32–3; see also Brown, Rural Society and Economic Change, 53.
82. R.W. Hoyle, ‘Introduction: Custom, Improvement and Anti-Improvement,’ in idem, ed., Custom, Improvement, and Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Routledge, 2013), 4.
83. Müller, ‘Peasants, Lords and Developments in Leasing,’ 172–3.
84. DeWindt, Land and People, 54.
85. Jones, ‘Bedfordshire,’ 200–2, 208–10, 216–7.
86. Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 153; Rosamond Faith, ‘Berkshire: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Harvey, ed., Peasant Land Market, 119; Campbell, ‘Population Pressure,’ 120–6.
87. Timothy Lomas noted that most transfers in southeastern bishopric vills were in bovates, and rarely for fewer than 10 acres Lomas, ‘South-East Durham,’ 308.
88. On the reorganization and expansion of Durham settlements, see Brian K. Roberts, Rural Settlement in Britain (Dawson, 1977; reprinted Hutchinson, 1979), 106–7, 148–50.
89. NYCRO, ZFL 107–15, 123–6, 129 and ZJB 2/1-5; see also Lomas, ‘South-East Durham,’ 308–9.
90. Peter L. Larson, ‘Widow-Right in Durham, England 1349-1660,’ Continuity & Change 33 (2018), 185–6.
91. P.L. Larson, ‘Village Voice or Village Oligarchy? The Jurors of the Durham Halmote Court, 1349–1424,’ Law and History Review 28 (2010), 698–9. See also Lomas, ‘South-East Durham,’ 315–6; DeWindt, Land and People, 124–8.
92. ‘South-East Durham,’ 309; DeWindt, Land and People, 110–2; Jones, ‘Bedfordshire,’ 197.
93. ‘Durham Land Market Database;’ Larson, ‘Peasant Opportunities,’ 148–51.
94. TNA: PRO DURH 3/14 56r; TNA: PRO DURH 3/15 111v.; 3/23 502v.
95. Lomas, ‘South-East Durham,’ 310.
96. Faith, ‘Berkshire,’ 157, 176–7.
97. R. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 38.
98. For Tunstall, TNA: PRO DURH 3/15 ff. 172v, 363r; 3/16 ff. 10r, 172r. For Cassop, TNA: PRO DURH 3/14 ff. 303r, 488v; 3/15 ff. 274r, 340v; 3/16 ff. 176r, 310r; 3/18 f. 49v.
99. P.L. Larson, ‘Peasant Opportunities in Rural Durham: Land, Vills and Mills, 1349–1500,’ in Ben Dodds and Christian D. Liddy, Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Richard Britnell (Boydell Press, 2011), 159; see also 156–62 regarding collective leasing of brew houses, mills, and demesne.
100. R. Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 38–39; Bursars’ Rentals, 199–217; Brown, Rural Society and Economic Change, 44–5.
101. Whittle, Development of Agrarian Capitalism, 60–3; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 304 ff. Dyer and Razi disagree on the weakening medieval bond: Razi, ‘Erosion of the Family-Land Bond,’ 295–304 and Dyer, ‘Changes in the Link between Families and Land in the West Midlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, 305–11.
102. ‘Durham Land Market Database;’ Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 198–200. For contraction in Durham, see Lomas, ‘Durham Cathedral Priory,’ 34–6; S.J. Harris, ‘Wastes, the Margins and the Abandonment of Land: The Bishop of Durham’s Estate, 1350-1480,’ in C.D. Liddy and Richard Britnell, eds., North-East England in the Later Middle Ages (Boydell Press, 2005), 197–219.
103. Mullan and Britnell, Land and Family, 153–4.
104. Williamson in Harvey, 102–4; Smith, ‘Families and Their Property,’ 38–54, 66–7; Schofield, Peasant and Community, 61–9 and ‘Lordship and the Early History of Peasant Land Transfer,’ 208.
105. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, 65; Harvey, Westminster Abbey, 212; Whittle, ‘Individualism,’ 49–55.
106. Schofield, ‘Lordship and the Early History of Peasant Land Transfer,’ 206–7, 210–20.
107. Richard Britnell, ‘Feudal Reaction after the Black Death in the Palatinate of Durham,’ Past and Present 128 (1990), 28–47; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, 82–110, 127–41.