The basic outline of the English economy in 1086 emerges very clearly from the repetitive, laconic phrases of Domesday Book. This was a fundamentally agrarian economy. Over 90 per cent of the people lived in the country and earned their daily bread and ale from the resources of the land. The land was already well settled – some 13,000 settlements are named – and much cultivated. As much as 80 per cent of the arable acreage of 1914 had been under the plough in 1086. Pasture, woodland, and fen were also exploited. Most men were farmers and fishers. In highland Britain, beyond the reach of Domesday Book, farmers grew oats and barley rather than wheat, and there were more cattle than sheep. Neither trade nor industry could offer a major alternative source of employment. Domesday statistics – though they have to be used as cautiously as any other statistics – can help to fill out the picture. People called villani comprised the most numerous class (41 per cent of the total recorded population). Their land holdings came to about 45 per cent of all the land. The next largest number (32 per cent) were the people known as ‘bordars’ or ‘cottars’; they held only 5 per cent of the land. Thus, although there were enormous individual variations, it is clear that we are dealing with two distinct classes: those who had a substantial stake in the village fields and those who possessed hardly more than a cottage and its garden. In addition there were the 14 per cent of the total who were described either as ‘free men’ or ‘sokemen’. Since they held a fifth of the land they seem to belong, economically speaking, to the same class as the villani. Finally there were the slaves, 9 per cent of the recorded population, who held no land.
At the other end of the social scale were the king and a tiny group of powerful men, all of them rentiers who lived in style on the revenues of their great estates. Fewer than 200 laymen and roughly 100 major churches (bishoprics, abbeys, and priories) held between them about three-quarters of the assessed value of the whole country. These men – in legal terminology they were known as the king’s tenants-in-chief – had tenants of their own. A wealthy baron like William de Warenne, for example, had granted out holdings worth about £540 out of an estate valued at over £1,150. Some of these subtenants were men described as knights and their tenancies as knights’ fees. (Although many of the knights were no richer than the richest villani the fact remains that they lived in closer association with their lords and therefore belonged to a different social group.) The rest of a tenant-in-chief’s estates – usually between a half and three-quarters of them – were kept ‘in demesne’, and it was from these demesne lands that a lord drew the bulk of his income and food. A monastic house, with a fixed centre, needed regular supplies of foodstuffs, but other great landlords, who were more peripatetic, would probably be more interested in money. Most demesnes therefore were leased – ‘farmed’ was the technical term – in return for a money rent. Most of the lessees came from exactly the same range of social ranks as did the holders of knights’ fees; together they constituted a landowning ‘middle class’, a gentry.
What happened to the English economy in the 200 years after 1086? Even over so long a period as this it can be argued that, in many fundamental respects, there was little change. England was no more urbanized in 1286 than in 1086. True, there were more and larger towns but then there were more people altogether. There were undoubtedly striking improvements in ship design – a continuing feature of northern Europe from the eighth century onwards. In this period it meant, above all, the development of the ‘cog’, a large, tubby bulk-carrier with a stern-post rudder and a deep draught. This meant economies of scale in the maritime trade which had long linked the east coast with the Scandinavian world and the west with the Atlantic coast of France. Presumably the volume of trade in wool, cloth, timber, salted fish, and wine was increasing and merchants’ profits may well have been increasing too. Even so there was no English commercial revolution, no development of banks and credit facilities of the kind that can be claimed for thirteenth-century Italy. One consequence of this relative backwardness was that in the thirteenth century an increasingly high proportion of England’s foreign trade came to be in Italian hands. Their reserves of liquid capital enabled Italian companies to offer attractive terms. They could not only buy an abbey’s entire wool clip for the current year; they could also buy it for years in advance. By lending large sums to Henry III and Edward I, they obtained royal patronage and protection. In a very real sense late thirteenth-century England was being treated as a partially developed economy. Much of its import–export business was handled by foreigners (Gascons and Flemings as well as Italians). Its main exports were raw materials – wool and grain – rather than manufactured goods. There had been, in other words, no industrial revolution.
7. Royal building. Royal patron, architect, and workmen are all portrayed in a thirteenth-century drawing of the building of the abbey of St Albans. (From Matthew Paris’s Vitae Offarum.)
Throughout this period the major industries remained the same ones: cloth, building, mining and metalworking, salt production, and sea fishing. Moreover, despite the claims sometimes made for the clothfulling mill, there were no significant advances in industrial technology. Nor was there anything to compare with the highly capitalized development of the Flemish cloth industry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the other hand growing Flemish demand for English wool did help to preserve the favourable balance of trade which, throughout this period, ensured an inflow of bullion sufficient to maintain the one coin, the silver penny, at a consistently fine standard. (Whereas in more rapidly developing and more highly monetized regions, people used a much debased coinage to perform the economic function of small change. In this sense too the English economy saw comparatively little change.)
Above all there was no agricultural revolution. Despite the fact that thirteenth-century experts on estate management, men such as Walter of Henley or Henry of Eastry, approached their job in a rational and scientific manner, the technical limitations under which they worked meant that no significant increase in yields was possible, neither from sheep in terms of weight of fleece, nor from seed in terms of yield of grain. Though the use of the horse as a draught animal was spreading, this was of marginal importance. The main problems lay not in ploughing, but in sowing, reaping, and maintaining soil fertility. Sowing and reaping by hand was wasteful and slow. Marl and most other types of fertilizer were either expensive or unobtainable. Only animal dung was generally available and it was widely and systematically used. But the high costs of feeding flocks and herds through the winter meant that there were upper limits to the amount of dung that could be produced. And unless there were basic improvements in primary production – as there were not – improvements at the second stage of production, for example the introduction of windmills around 1200, could only be of marginal economic importance. Thus in many respects England remained a stagnant economy. It can indeed be argued that, by comparison with some of its neighbours, especially Flanders and Italy, England was less advanced in the thirteenth century than it had been in the eleventh. But this is a modern perspective. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century England people felt they lived in a country which was economically advanced by comparison with the lands of their Celtic neighbours.
Population Growth
Having said all this, it must be made clear that in one vital respect there had been considerable change. By the late thirteenth century there were far more people living in Britain than there had been in 1086 – notwithstanding the fact that men and women were familiar with coitus interruptus as a method of birth control. Exactly how many people there were, it is impossible to say. Estimating the English population at the time of the Domesday survey is an extremely difficult task. Most historians would put it at between 1.25 and 2.25 millions. Estimating the late thirteenth-century English population is yet more hazardous. Some historians would go as high as 7 millions; others would put it much lower, perhaps 5 millions. Estimating the populations of Scotland and Wales is even more hazardous still. Recent guesses suggest 0.5 to 1 million for Scotland c.1300, and about 0.25 million for Wales. But most historians agree that the population more than doubled in this period. The hypothesis of slow growth from the eleventh (or perhaps indeed from the tenth) century, followed by an acceleration from the end of the twelfth century onwards, seems to be a plausible one. But not only did rates of growth vary (probably) over time; they also varied (certainly) in space. Thus the population of the North Riding of Yorkshire probably increased some twelvefold in the 200 years after 1086; elsewhere, and particularly in those areas which were already relatively densely settled by the time of the Domesday survey, that is along the south coast and in some parts of East Anglia, the growth rate was very much smaller, though it was particularly high in the silt belt around the Wash.
Expansion of Settlement and Cultivation
What were the economic consequences of this increase of population? One was the physical expansion of settlement and cultivation, especially in the Celtic lands. Here, indeed, there are plenty of signs of what the citizen of the modern world is inclined to call progress. Coins were first minted in the late eleventh century in Wales, and in the twelfth century in Scotland. Moreover the twelfth century witnessed the first town foundations in both Wales (e.g. Monmouth, Brecon, Cardiff, and Pembroke) and Scotland (e.g. Berwick, Edinburgh, Stirling, and Perth). In England, too, towns flourished. Their main function was to act as local markets. Where we know the occupations of their inhabitants, the predominance of the victualling trades and of craftsmen – shopkeepers in leather, metal, and textiles – is striking. Even for the big towns – and by European standards England contained only one genuinely big town, London, assessed in 1334 at four times the wealth of its nearest rival, Bristol – long-distance and luxury trade remained less important. An increasing density of rural population meant that towns increased both in size and in number. Between 1100 and 1300, some 140 new towns were planted and, if it is not just a trick of the evidence, it would seem that the decades between 1170 and 1250 saw the greatest number: Portsmouth, Leeds, Liverpool, Chelmsford, Salisbury, for example. Mostly they were founded by local lords who expected to make a profit out of the money rents and tolls they planned to collect. Some were sited where they could take advantage of the expansion of maritime commerce, as larger ships meant that coastal ports such as Boston, King’s Lynn, and Hull (all new foundations) did better than up-river ports such as Lincoln, Norwich, and York.
In the countryside, too, the hand of the planner is sometimes visible, particularly in the regular-form villages which were laid out in those northern areas which had been laid waste by the Normans. Elsewhere, in already densely settled East Anglia for example, villages sometimes moved to new sites straggling along the edge of common land, presumably in order to free good arable land from the ‘waste’ of being built upon. But finding room to live was one thing; growing enough food to live on quite another. In general the expansion of farmland took place not so much through the establishment of new settlements as through piecemeal increase around existing centres. Huge acreages of forest, fen, marsh, and upland were cleared, drained, and farmed. Some of this was on potentially good soil – the silt belt around the Wash is the classic example – but much of it, like the clearings in the Sussex Weald, would always remain poor. This is ‘the journey to the margin’ – men moved out to the margins of cultivation and farmed land that was indeed marginal: it produced returns which were barely worth the labour expended. So pressing was the demand for food, bread above all, that even other ‘necessities’ – fuel and building timber – were having to give way. Other English families travelled west or north in search of new lands to settle. In Scotland they generally came by invitation. Enterprising kings of Scotland welcomed the English as settlers in their new burghs. By contrast in Wales and Ireland they were invited and encouraged by the new invaders, not by the native rulers. In Ireland they took over the old Viking ports of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, as well as founding new towns and villages.
In eastern England especially, attempts were made to farm the existing arable more intensively. In the thirteenth century the three-field, instead of the two-field, system came to be more widely adopted. This meant that a third rather than a half of the land was left fallow each year. But more intensive land use required a correspondingly more intensive application of fertilizers if soil quality were to be maintained. Unfortunately, the expansion of arable was sometimes at the expense of both pasture and woodland. The effect of this on livestock numbers could hardly have permitted increased manure production and may have actually led to a decrease in droppings. This in turn could have led to soil exhaustion and lower, rather than higher, yields. Whether or not yields did decline towards the end of the thirteenth century, one thing that does seem clear is that, if the physical limit of cultivation were reached and population still continued to grow, then one of two things would have to happen. Either more food would be imported or the average standard of living would have to fall. There is no evidence that grain imports rose. If anything the trend was probably in the opposite direction. English grain dealers took their merchandise in bulk-carrying ships to regions such as Flanders, Gascony, and Norway, that is, to places where industrialization or specialization had reached a higher pitch than in England and where regional economics were geared to the import of basic foodstuffs in return for cloth, wine, and forest products. Moreover the abundant estate records of thirteenth-century England make it clear that the average size of tenant holdings was shrinking. In this period more people means less land per head.
The Free, the Servile, and the Poor
Despite this gloomy picture, many thirteenth-century villagers may have been better off than their predecessors at the time of Domesday Book. They were relatively free from the devastation caused by war. None of them was a slave. Slavery is a feature of economies characterized by labour shortage; as population, and therefore the supply of labour, rose, so slavery declined. True, many of them were serfs (or villeins) – perhaps as much as half the total population – whereas the villani and cottagers of Domesday Book (three-quarters of the listed population) were free. But although the villani and cottagers were free inasmuch as they were not slaves, it is clear that they were not very free – thus the existence of the much smaller Domesday class (only 14 per cent of those listed) called precisely ‘free men’. What made life difficult for the villani and cottagers was that their lords were free too – free and powerful. They were free to manipulate custom in order to impose as many burdens as they could, and in a period of relative labour shortage this is likely to have meant a heavy regime of labour services: at times like this lords would not be content to pay wages at levels set by the market. Only as supply rose would lords increasingly turn to the alternative of wage labour. In the twelfth century, many tenants found their obligations converted from labour service to payment of a money rent. At this point, the development of the legalistic outlook becomes important. In the decades either side of the year 1200, the king’s judges formulated rules to determine who had the right to have their disputes heard in the royal courts and who had not. They decided that those who had the right were ‘free’, while those who had not were ‘servile’. The effect of this classification of society into two distinct categories was to enserf half the population: to make them legally unfree. But what the lawyers took with one hand they gave with the other. The more everything came to be defined and written down, the more customary tenures tended to become ‘frozen’ in that state in which they were written down. It became less easy to manipulate custom; more effectively than before custom tended to protect the status quo. In this sense, even unfree tenants in the thirteenth century were less vulnerable to the arbitrary exactions of individual lords than many free tenants of the eleventh century had been. Thirteenth-century lords who tried to manipulate custom often found themselves involved in long legal battles with well-organized village communities.
But although customary law may have offered a poor tenant some protection from his lord’s demands, it could do nothing to protect him from the grim realities of economic change. In the years either side of 1200, half the villagers of England may have been enserfed, but this mattered little compared with the fact that poor villagers became still poorer. Those who really suffered towards the end of the thirteenth century were not servile tenants as such, but those tenants, whether free or servile, who were poor and those who had no land at all. We know something about tenants. Mortality rates on the Winchester manors suggest that from 1250 onwards the poorer tenants were becoming increasingly ‘harvest-sensitive’ – a euphemistic phrase meaning that, with each bad harvest, more of them died, either of starvation or of the diseases attendant upon malnutrition. Study of the West Midlands manor of Halesowen suggests that poor tenants there – the successors of the cottagers of Domesday – had a life expectancy some ten years less than the better-off tenants, the successors of the Domesday villani. What happened to the landless we can only guess; the nature of the evidence is such that they rarely find themselves mentioned in thirteenth-century records. Labourers on great estates customarily received not only cash but also an allowance of grain sufficient to sustain a family. But what about those landless labourers who became surplus to the economy? Presumably they also became ‘harvest-sensitive’.
Management of Estates
But the economic clouds which brought misery for the poor were nicely lined with silver for the rich. The growth of population meant an increasing demand for food. Prices rose, particularly around 1200 and in the late thirteenth century. On the other hand, a plentiful supply of labour meant that money wage rates, both for piece-work and for day-work, remained stable throughout the century. Real wages, in other words, fell. In these circumstances, wealthy landowners could do very well. Selling their surplus produce on the market brought increasing profits. Markets proliferated. Between 1198 and 1483 some 2,400 grants of market were made by the Crown and of these over half came in the period before 1275. Equally a rising demand for tenancies meant growing rent-rolls. To take just one example, the bishop of Ely’s net income rose from £920 in 1171–2 to £2,550 in 1298. But this does not quite mean that all the fortunate possessor of a great estate had to do was sit back and let the laws of supply and demand do their work for him. In the twelfth century, as before, most of the manors belonging to a wealthy tenant-in-chief were in fact held by his tenants, either as knights’ fees or leased out at fixed rents to ‘farmers’. At a time of stability or gradual expansion, this made good sense; from the lord’s point of view it kept his administrative costs down to a minimum. The stability of the system is indicated by the fact that long-term leases for a life or for several lives were common, and that these long-term grants tended to turn into hereditary tenures.
But the steep rise in prices around 1200 created severe problems for the lord living on fixed rents. If he, rather than his tenants, were to take advantage of the market economy, then he had to switch to direct management of his manors. To abandon an age-old system was not easy and many lords encountered fierce resistance from their tenants, but gradually it was done. The most famous description of the process can be read in Jocelin of Brakelond’s account of the business-like life of Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds (abbot 1182–1211). The landlord took his estates into his own hands, appointed bailiffs and reeves to run them and sell the surplus on the open market. Under this new regime, the lord’s expenses and profits were going to vary from year to year. This would have made it very easy for his officials to cheat him unless a close check were kept on their activities. So a detailed record of the manorial year was drawn up and then sent, together with similar returns from the other manors, to be checked by auditors who represented the central administration of a great estate. (The survival of masses of these accounts means that we know a great deal about some aspects of the thirteenth-century English rural economy.) The auditors had a policy-making as well as a fraud-detecting role. They fixed targets for each manor, the levels of production of grain and livestock which had to be reached. They took investment decisions, whether to build new barns, whether to buy fertilizers, and so on. Inspired by these concerns a whole new literature was born, treatises on agriculture and estate management, of which Walter of Henley’s Husbandry is the most famous. All these changes presupposed the existence of widespread practical literacy: without this it would not have been possible to carry through the managerial revolution – for that is what it was – of the early thirteenth century.
The whole point of the new system was to maximize the lord’s profits, and to do so in as rational a way as possible. It seems unlikely that this was an approach which was going to concern itself with the problems facing the poor, the lame ducks of the economic system, nearly all of whom were born lame. At a manorial level there are innumerable cases of resistance to a lord’s demands, both passive resistance and direct, sometimes legal, action. In the towns, too, there is increasing evidence of a struggle between rich and poor. Despite the ‘safety valve’ of the opportunities provided by migration into Celtic lands, it looks as though by the 1290s England was a country choked with people, a traditional economy unable to cope with the strains of population pressure, even perhaps a land on the brink of class warfare.