9

Peasants and industry

The Middle Ages are sometimes described as belonging to a pre-industrial age, which ignores the large numbers of people who worked at least part-time in industrial or non-agricultural activities. In the west midlands crafts and manufactures could be concentrated in towns, most intensively in Droitwich’s salt boiling, but also clothmaking employed many people at times in Coventry and Bristol, and in smaller south Gloucestershire towns such as Stroud and Dursley. Worcester became a cloth centre towards the end of our period. Most towns provided a living for artisans practising a range of skills, and their strength lay in their ability to satisfy the varied needs of their hinterlands (see ‘Occupations and commerce’ in Chapter 8). Here we are concerned with the thousands of country people engaged in crafts, or in activities ancillary to industry, who probably exceeded in number the town-based manufacturing workers.

Three districts with especially concentrated industrial activity can be identified in the later Middle Ages: the Forest of Dean; the Frome valley including Bisley and Minchinhampton; and the settlements around Birmingham in north-west Warwickshire and north-east Worcestershire. However, crafts were scattered over the countryside, with groups of artisans in pockets such as the potters of Chilvers Coton and Hanley Castle, and individuals and small clusters working as smiths, tailors, and carpenters dispersed in many villages (Figure 9.1). The prevalence of dual occupations, or the phenomenon called by the French ‘pluriactivity’ makes it difficult for us to pin a label on a person or a household. Juries required to identify people’s status and occupations might in the mid-fifteenth century describe William Huntley of Churcham (Gloucestershire) as a yeoman, husbandman, and tailor. ¹ The balance between his agricultural and craft work would have varied with the seasons. His household could well have included a daughter who span woollen yarn, and a wife with a brewing and ale-selling sideline. The lack of specialization shows up in the archaeological record: for example, when an iron chisel is found in a peasant house, is this evidence that a peasant might occasionally have built a stone wall, or even worked part-time as a mason, or that the household at some time employed a specialist (but forgetful) artisan? ²

Figure 9.1 Industries in the region. An impressionistic indication of non-agricultural activities and products in the countryside.

To what extent did peasants take on non-agricultural occupations on their own initiative, or did they join in enterprises devised by elites, both aristocratic and urban? Were they driven to participate by poverty, or were they in a position to advance themselves and seek profits? To explore these questions, four themes will be proposed, which could be described as models of industrialization: lords as creators of industry, the urban entrepreneur promoting manufacture, poverty as a spur to industrial employment, and the dual economy, generated within peasant communities.

The role of lords in creating industry

Lords of many kinds founded rural industrial enterprises which could be on a large scale and well-documented. Cistercian monks have a strong reputation for practical profit-seeking both in their organization of farming and in founding industries. Flaxley Abbey in the heart of the Forest of Dean was in a good position to manage ironworking, and its itinerant forge is recorded in 1258. ³ The ironworking establishment about which we have the most detailed knowledge was organized by Bordesley Abbey in north-east Worcestershire. The water-powered forge developed from the late twelfth century, and flourished with renewals of buildings and machinery until the late fourteenth. Excavation has revealed an elaborate water control system, with a mill powering bellows and hammers, producing a wide variety of metalwork, including weapons, nails, and tenterhooks. These were partly for use on the monastic estates, and partly for sale. The written sources contain no mention of this enterprise. ⁴ Lay lords as well as monasteries invested in ironworking, and in the Worcestershire industrial zone, near Dudley, Roger de Somery in 1291 was profiting from a coal mine and an iron mine associated with two great forges. A member of the gentry in the Warwickshire woodlands, John Brome in the mid-fifteenth century set up a tile house at Baddesley Clinton to exploit an abundance of fuel and clay in order to supply roof tiles to nearby towns. Brome also developed a stone quarry. ⁵

As consumers the aristocracy had a limited part in stimulating local rural industry by their consumption as they tended to obtain their cloth, metalwork, and high-quality leather goods from outside the region. However, their spending on buildings led to purchases of local materials such as stone, timber, and tiles, and they employed local labour. Examples of technical innovation in building were the prestigious brick houses constructed towards the end of our period, of which the first at Fulbrook (Warwickshire) was conceived by the Duke of Bedford in the 1430s. Although the bricks were made locally, on site, the expertise probably came from visiting artisans from the Low Countries. ⁶

Both lords and peasants contributed to the emergence of one type of rural artisan, the village smith. In the early Middle Ages kings, aristocrats, and leading churchmen took a strong interest in ironworking for strategic military and economic reasons, and smiths, who could be itinerant, or attached to an estate centre, had a special status. ⁷ A smith was active at Bidford-on-Avon (Warwickshire), a royal estate centre, judging from a ninth-century deposit of ironworking debris and iron objects in a small hoard that apparently served some commemorative or ritualistic purpose. ⁸ In the Domesday Book, smiths are mentioned in Worcestershire in eight places, and as they were listed with villeins and bordars they were apparently tenants with land. In the early twelfth-century survey of Pinbury in Gloucestershire the forge is mentioned alongside the mill and the church, and the smith may have been one of the tenants. ⁹

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, lords of all kinds—bishops, monasteries, and lay lords—are recorded as setting up smiths’ holdings on their manors. The tenants were responsible for ironworking for the lord, in parallel with those tenants serving as a shepherd, ploughman, or carter. The amount of land assigned to smiths varied in size from smallholdings to standard yardlands or half-yardlands on customary or servile tenures. The holdings would owe the usual combination of cash and labour, with servile dues such as tallage, toll on the sale of animals, and marriage fines. However, the smith would not be liable to rents and labour services if he served the lord as an ironworker. These specialist duties were vaguely described: at Blackwell (Warwickshire) in 1240 the smith with a cotland was ‘to work on the iron of the ploughs’, ¹⁰ but usually the smith was expected to make or repair the ironwork of each plough (they varied in number between two and six). The largest pieces of iron were the coulter and share, but presumably the smith’s duties extended to the smaller fittings such as chains, and the iron on the plough’s foot at the front of the plough. Additional tasks would be shoeing horses, either on the front feet of two animals, or all four feet for one animal. On the estates of the nuns of Caen in Gloucestershire (Minchinhampton and its attached manors) an extra task in the late twelfth century was to provide seven scythes and seven weeding hooks, which was reduced to five of each of these implements by 1306. In the same year a smith with a smallholding had lighter duties, shoeing one horse and sharpening axes and scythes. The smiths on the Caen estate were expected to attend to the iron hinges on the doors of particular manorial buildings. For all of their jobs around the manor they provided their own iron and steel, but were accorded various privileges, such as a crop of wheat from an acre of demesne land, and the right to pasture animals, oxen in one case, ewes in another. Trees could be taken from the demesne wood to make charcoal for the forge. ¹¹

On other estates the lords would provide the metal, though some came from recycling the parts being replaced. The smith’s duties might include the sharpening of the bills that were used to recut the grooves on millstones. At Fladbury, according to the survey of 1299, if he carried out this task the smith could have his own corn ground without paying toll. ¹²

An earlier arrangement (in c.1170) on the manor of Northwick (Worcestershire) assigned the smith two acres of rye and two acres of oats on the demesne, but the usual practice was to provide land. ¹³ On the bishop of Worcester’s estate the idea of endowing a smith with land for the service of ironworking had been adopted on five manors by c.1170, and had spread to eleven of the nineteen manors surveyed in 1299.

Problems arose as was common in many feudal relationships based on the exchange of land for services. At Hampton Lucy, after the death of Richard Smith in the early thirteenth century, the smith’s holding lay uncultivated and the house stood empty. Potential tenants resented the servile dues, and the lord eventually persuaded a new smith to take on the land by removing the liability to pay toll, pannage, and marriage fines. ¹⁴ Enforcing the performance of service became difficult, so that smiths on the Worcester Priory manors of Cleeve Prior and Cropthorne in 1337 ‘did not do the iron work as agreed’. ¹⁵ The days of the smith’s tenement were numbered, and lords increasingly engaged smiths to work on ploughs who were free agents, working for an agreed price, or for wages.

The tenant smith’s work for the lord, even the many tasks at Minchinhampton, occupied a fraction of his time and he must have lived by working for money for his peasant neighbours. Smiths holding tenements in return for doing the lords’ ironwork had previously worked independently, and some smiths continued to hold land through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries without special obligations, like Thomas Faber (Smith), a smallholder of Hanbury in c.1170, or the holder of a quarter-yardland at White Ladies Aston in 1299 called John Faber (both in Worcestershire). ¹⁶

The breakdown of the system of smiths’ tenements left a scatter of independent smiths over the countryside, providing a service for both lords’ demesnes and peasants. The old arrangements were not forgotten immediately. Coventry Priory noted that Simon Smith of Honington (Warwickshire) in 1411 held a yardland for 12s rent, and recalled that the former tenants of the holding had once performed a smith’s duties. ¹⁷

How many smiths were working in the countryside? The collectors of the 1379 poll tax in Warwickshire did not record occupations systematically, but in a total of ninety-one villages they found smiths in thirty-four, suggesting their presence in at least one village in three. ¹⁸ If that figure was applied across the three counties of the region, there were 400 rural smiths in the late fourteenth century. Allowance should be made for undercounting in the poll tax, and for clusters in the specialist industrial districts such as the four smiths in 1381 at Little Dean in the Forest of Dean, but Dean was unfortunately not fully documented. ¹⁹ There may well have been more than 500 rural smiths working in the region around 1380.

To sum up the development of rural smiths, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lords anchored smiths on manors. Some smiths operated independently even in the hey-day of the tenant smiths, and the whole craft slipped out of seigneurial control in the fourteenth century. Lords had helped to spread smiths over the countryside, and they gained a secure place in village society. Some smiths could have been the descendants of the itinerant or estate craftsmen of the early Middle Ages. Others came into the craft as the commercial world expanded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They needed both equipment and training, funded perhaps by their families. The tools were expensive, judging from the value of 16s 8d put on an anvil at Blackwell (Warwickshire) in 1395. ²⁰ In 1391 the lord of Long Marston (Warwickshire) listed the smith’s tools as principalia, not just the anvil but also a forehammer (heavy hammer), a pair of tongs, hurthestoff (equipment around the hearth), a wosshel (unknown), a grindstone with an iron spindle and bellows. ²¹ They are not valued, but are likely to have been worth much more than 20s, especially if allowance is made for the lesser tools omitted, such as small hammers, punches, and files. A smithy excavated at Burton Dassett Southend indicates the investment and skill deployed ²² (Figure 9.2). The building (facing on to the main street with easy access) measured 12m by 5m, so it was smaller than some houses, but with solidly constructed stone foundations. It was occupied from the early thirteenth century to the early fifteenth, and may have had some space for a rather cramped domestic life. The single room (with partitions or screens in some phases of occupation) contained a hearth and an anvil. A block of stone and stone troughs were part of the equipment. We can imagine the implements described in the Long Marston list, such as the bellows, deployed around the hearth. Metallurgical experts who have examined the site’s debris, mainly slag and hammerscale, have noted evidence for a wide range of processes–hot forging, cold work, and fire welding. For example, the smiths who worked here could make iron tools with steel edges. They concluded that the building was occupied by general smiths (over many generations) ‘manufacturing and repairing a range of domestic and agricultural artefacts’. They would have acted as farriers, as horse shoeing was in demand from customers visiting the market as well as residents. However, the quantity of slag suggested that the work had not been continuous. The smith worked part-time or seasonally, so he fitted into the ‘dual economy’, summed up in the Gloucestershire poll tax of 1381 by a taxpayer described as ‘a smith and cultivator’.

Figure 9.2 A smith’s tenement at Burton Dassett, Southend. Successive smiths occupied this building over two centuries. In the early fifteenth-century phase shown here, the layout of the workshop can be identified. The building had stone walls, and the plot was defined by a boundary ditch (and probably a hedge) (source: note 22).

The craft had a strong hereditary tradition, so that skills, specialized buildings, and expensive equipment often passed from father to son. The excavation of the Burton Dassett Southend smithy did not produce pottery or finds which suggested that the successive tenants enjoyed great prosperity, and the same conclusion emerges from the tax records or court roll evidence from other villages. Working as a smith was a steady living, but it did not usually lead to wealth.

Urban entrepreneurs and rural industry

Town-based entrepreneurs could play a central role in the origins of rural industry. For a long period between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries over much of Europe rural industries were based on artisans with family members working in their own homes often to supply distant markets. The term proto-industrialization was applied rather reluctantly in England, but the organization of production and distribution was essentially the same as on the continent. ²³ The entrepreneurs who oversaw manufacturing and marketing might be based in the country, but were often urban merchants who could take advantage of the infrastructure and communication links of the town to buy materials and distribute goods. They had access to credit networks through which the commerce could be funded. The entrepreneur, a clothier in the case of textile manufacture, operated a putting-out system which could erode the independence of the artisan and eventually led to a wage-earning labour force.

In the west midlands in the Stroudwater district cloth making had begun by c.1170–1200, but then greatly expanded in the following two centuries when in the hamlets in the valley of the river Frome between Stroud and Chalford manufacture was concentrated around a growing number of fulling mills (Figure 9.3). The cloths came in various colours and qualities, but the most celebrated were marketed as ‘Bristol reds’ or ‘Stroudwaters’, and were sent to London and Bristol to be distributed, and often sold on the continent. The Stroudwater evidence is not abundant, but John Benet of Cirencester who died in 1497 seems to have had the right connections and characteristics to identify him as a town-based entrepreneur with significant links to the rural industry. ²⁴ His will reveals that he had houses in Stroud, Ebley, and the nearby small town of King’s Stanley, and sublet a house in Rodborough. Four churches and chapels in Stroudwater received bequests from him. He owned a fulling mill, and also cloth shears (for trimming the knap) which suggested that he employed workers skilled in finishing cloth. Four female servants benefited from his will, as did nine employees.

Figure 9.3 Distribution of fulling mills. The mills can be traced in a great variety of documents, dated between 1180 and 1540. Many are only mentioned once, and may not have worked for a long span of time.

Robert Rychards was a clothier of Dursley, a small town in the deep valley of the river Ewelme, 5 miles to the south-west of Stroud. His will and inventory of 1492 indicate the scale of his business, as he was in process of selling forty cloths, most of them red, worth £116. ²⁵ He had an apprentice, three servants, and nine other employees. We can follow through the various processes of cloth manufacture from his possessions and bequests, beginning with raw wool worth £5 10s. 0d, and proceeding to the large quantity of yarn worth £48, which must have been the result of employing dozens of spinners in Dursley itself and the surrounding countryside. He left money to the parish churches of Cam and Slimbridge, so perhaps some of his spinners lived there. Three broad looms appear in the inventory, but although weavers may have worked in his house, he was probably also putting out yarn to weavers living and working in their own houses. The cloth would have been fulled in one of the local mills, and the fullers would have been responsible for the tentering and shearing. Dyeing was done on Rychards’s own premises, where he had a dyehouse equipped with a ‘great furnace’ and two ‘great vats’. He had a store of madder (a red dye) and alum (the chemical mordant needed for the dyeing process). He bought the imported dyestuffs and alum from Bristol, and sold the finished cloths in London, where at the time of his death he had three packs containing eighteen cloths. The ultimate purchasers were continental merchants with German names like Gerard von Wesel, Herman Kyng, and Herman Bytterweke. Rychard’s business, like all clothiers and other medieval traders, depended on credit. The purchasers of his cloth owed him more than £200, but the executors of his will regarded these as ‘good debts’ (meaning that payment was expected). Rychards no doubt owed money to his suppliers of wool, and his spinners, weavers, and fullers, but like his customers, would pay eventually. Merchants such as Benet and Rychards had the wide contacts and experience to enable them to obtain imported dyestuffs, oil, alum, and soap that were needed for cloth manufacture, to sell cloth overseas, to organize finance, and manage the various stages of production and marketing.

The Stroudwater cloth industry seems to have developed in accord with the earlier characterization of proto-industries, because the independent weavers, fullers, dyers, and shearmen of the early stages became a work force of wage earners, judging from the 1525 tax for four of the main clothmaking villages in Bisley hundred, where of 209 taxpayers, 106 were paying tax on wages of 20s, and another sixty-six were assessed on goods of 40s, among whom were likely to have been some receiving wages. ²⁶

Other clothmaking centres in the west midlands were in no way as concentrated as in south Gloucestershire, but there are signs of the influence of urban entrepreneurs among those who took on the leases of fulling mills. They were outsiders and sometimes connected to a town, like the lessee at Sherborne in the eastern Cotswolds in 1342 who came from Winchcomb, or in 1465 William Yronmonger of Chipping Campden took on the Tredington (Warwickshire) mill. The tenant of the new Wolverley mill in 1482 in north Worcestershire came not from a town but from an industrial district at Tettenhall in Staffordshire, and other fulling mills in other villages tended to be held by men called Touker or Walker (both meaning ‘fuller’) as if they came, with some experience and expertise, from other clothmaking places. ²⁷ It was not unusual for them to be given the responsibility of repairing or maintaining the mill, or even building or rebuilding it, suggesting that they were bringing capital to the project as well as experience.

Entrepreneurs both urban and rural had a part in the co-ordination of the Stroudwater industry. Fourteen clothiers from Dursley are recorded in the Common Pleas records for the period 1480–1500, and thirteen clothiers or clothmen from Stroudwater who seem to have been homegrown, and country-based. Their origin might be traced back to c.1170–1200, when already ‘fuller’ appears as a not uncommon surname at Avening and Minchinhampton. ²⁸ A family called ‘de Rodborough’ moved the short distance from Rodborough to Minchinhampton enabling Richard de Rodborough in 1241 to acquire a free yardland, and Thomas de Rodborough, perhaps his son, was well enough established by 1250–70 to witness a deed. The name Thomas reappears in 1306, perhaps belonging to another generation, holding a yardland and a half (for riding services) and two half yardlands, so with a total of 75 acres. Such a substantial land holder would be called franklin in the thirteenth century, and in the fifteenth a yeoman. He rented a fulling mill at Brimscombe in the Frome valley, a mile from the main settlement of Minchinhampton, and also paid an annual rent for water rights attached to a mill in Bisley on the north bank of the Frome. ²⁹ Perhaps his interest in fulling was as an investor drawing rent from mills, or perhaps he was playing a more active role in the industry, but the family’s history suggests the mechanisms by which a well-off land holder might be drawn into clothmaking in that district. A later clothier from Rodborough, Edward Haliday, who died in 1519 holding a fulling mill and a dyehouse, was the son of a fuller. ³⁰ Rural clothiers in Suffolk, Kent, and Yorkshire have been traced back to families of artisans, especially fullers and dyers, and from better-off peasants. The clothiers who emerged out of a landed background tended not to cut themselves off from their origins but pursued dual occupations in which they combined some farming with clothmaking. A Bisley clothier owned 200 sheep, and a Chalford fulling mill was held with a half yardland and a close. ³¹

The north Warwickshire iron industry could have been co-ordinated by ironmongers based in Birmingham. The first reference to such a specialist was in 1448. ³² Traders in iron wares, especially weapons emerged more prominently in the early sixteenth century. John Coke, William Smythe, John Browne, and Richard Russell were selling the heads of bills (infantry weapons) to the king in 1511–13, and also bridle bits. ³³ Their activities were on such a scale that they must have received orders from royal officials and then commissioned the blade smiths to produce the goods. In normal times their role, judging from the activities of their successors, was to supply bar iron to the blade smiths and other specialists in and around Birmingham, and to find markets for the finished products. ³⁴ Some metalworking artisans judging from their wills still retained some independence, and were in contact with their own customers. Gloucester entrepreneurs might have been active in the Forest of Dean iron industry, but although many artisans in the city worked with iron brought from Dean, such as smiths, cutlers, and wiredrawers, there were very few traders described as a ‘hardwareman’ or ironmonger who were likely to have been distributing iron wares. ³⁵

In smaller industries connections can be found between urban traders and rural workers. Gypsum was quarried near Stratford-upon-Avon in the fifteenth century, and was burnt to make plaster. The presence in the town of a ‘plastermonger’ in 1445–6 suggests that a townsman was arranging the sale of the product. ³⁶ In other places lime was produced in a similar way, and marketed over considerable distances, but if there were dealers in lime they must have been based in the country near the lime pits and lime kilns, probably at producing villages such as Wootton Wawen (Warwickshire). ³⁷

Poverty and industry

A long-running debate about the modern industrial revolution concerned the effect it had on lowering or improving the living standards of industrial workers, and it has also been proposed that prevalent high wages in the eighteenth century stimulated the adoption of labour-saving machinery. ³⁸ In the thirteenth century the labour force was increasing in size, and employment in agriculture was insufficient to support a large population of cottagers and smallholders, so they turned to industrial employment. Those who were developing industries were encouraged to do so by the plentiful supply of cheap labour. The labour force was expanded not just by the growing numbers of men, but also by the females and children who were considered to be well-suited to some types of industrial work.

The workforce was often to be found in woodland districts, with their abundant raw materials and fuel. Smallholders proliferated in woodland landscapes because freeholdings tended to be divided by inheritance and the land market, and new cottages could be built on the edge of commons. Commercialization gave smallholders chances of gaining income from retail trade or casual employment, which tempted people to marry and begin a new household. Timber and wood generated employment opportunities, both for skilled specialist wood workers such as turners and cartwrights, but also the less skilled workers who felled trees, lopped branches, or cut coppice wood. A specific and long-standing activity was the harvesting of wood fuel for the Droitwich salt works, which extended 12 miles and more from the town. In 1294 at Romsley (10 miles distant) a cartload of the lord’s underwood was cut illicitly for carriage to the salt town. ³⁹ Woods within easy reach of the Severn, at places such as Ribbesford and Shrawley, periodically had their underwood felled and carted to the river for transport by boat for major consumers such as Tewkesbury Abbey and Worcester Priory. ⁴⁰ Many artisans, or makers of iron in bloomeries relied on wood fuel and charcoal, and the potash used in cloth making was produced by ashburners clearing vegetation and burning it in woods in north Warwickshire (to supply Coventry) and around Stroud in Gloucestershire. Consequently a living could be made by wielding axes and billhooks.

Two examples, Tidenham and Hanley Castle, can be used to demonstrate how non-agricultural employment developed in woodland landscapes, in which the many smallholders needed a source of income. Tidenham was a large estate to the south-west of the Forest of Dean occupying a peninsula between the rivers Wye and Severn. It combined arable land with abundant woods and areas of open pasture with dispersed settlements. In 1306 a survey listed 144 tenants, and of these 110 held 11 acres or less and twenty-eight of them also held a fishery. Fish traps in the tidal waters of the two rivers survived in use until modern times, and very similar medieval predecessors have been excavated. They consisted of fences based on wooden stakes driven into the riverbed, closely woven with rods, which guided the fish into funnel-shaped basket-work ‘putts’. Judging from their rents, between 2d and 6s 8d, the fisheries varied greatly in the size of their catch. Most paid the lord less than 2s, and presumably the fish that were caught were worth more. Another eighteen fisheries were held by people without recorded landholding. Perhaps these were landless, or they held land as subtenants or from another lord. Including these in the calculation, and adding them to the tenants of 11 acres or less, 16 per cent of the tenants of Tidenham were using the fishery either as a major means of support or as a significant supplement to a relatively small holding. Some of the Tidenham fisheries were operated by tenants with large and middling holdings, so fishing was not practised entirely by the less well off. ⁴¹ Constructing the fish traps, cutting the timber posts, rods, and withies kept many workers busy, and labour was also required to process the fish, such as salting the salmon. This productive activity did not spring into existence with the thirteenth-century growth in population and commerce, as fish traps at Tidenham are fully recorded before the Conquest.

At Hanley Castle in Malvern Chase, pottery making was clearly linked to those lacking much land. Arable land and meadow lay near the River Severn on the eastern side of the parish, but with plenty of wood and pasture to the west. Settlements called ends were strung along the roads that ran to the west from the river (Figure 9.4; see also Figure 2.7). Hanley manor had at least a hundred holdings, most of them not large, with thirty-two of them in 1296 each consisting of 6 acres. The manorial surveys note the potters separately, thirteen of them in 1296, ten in 1315. There is no evidence that they held land, but each paid the lord a standard rent of 6d per annum for clay and wood fuel. Evidently the potters were either subtenants, or tenants of the small manor of Hanley Hall, or were landless. They dug numerous clay pits, some of them on common land on roadsides, and probably kept livestock on the extensive pastures which lay next to the western ‘ends’. A survey of 1349 said that all of the potters were dead. ⁴² A factor in this may have been that in addition to deaths among those making pots, the epidemic left jobs and land vacant elsewhere, and some potters moved away from their arduous and not very well rewarded occupation. However, a new generation took up the craft, and the industry flourished into the seventeenth century, at times on a larger scale than before 1350. Pottery making at Hanley can be located from a single excavated kiln and one probable kiln site, but mainly from scatters of pottery and roofing tiles which occur throughout the western end of the parish, including some very dense concentrations containing thousands of pottery fragments. In the same industrial zone, dozens of clay pits are still visible as ponds. Finds in the river by the quay show that pottery and tiles were distributed by boat.

Figure 9.4 Hanley Castle. Potters in a landscape. One kiln has been excavated, and the existence of another has been detected, but hundreds would have been active over the three centuries of the medieval industry. The intensity of manufacture is suggested by numerous clay pits and scatters of potsherds, some very large, focused on the various ‘ends’ (hamlets), and the roads leading to them. The woods to the west of the ends provided fuel. The finds in the east of the parish, near the wharf, probably relate to settlement and agriculture, not manufacture (source: note 42 and Worcestershire Historic Environment Record).

Suburbs provided other contexts for smallholders using industrial employment to make ends meet. The urban fringes gave access to the town to migrants who often held cottages or only a few acres of land. Coventry Cathedral Priory held a ring of property around the edge of its city, at such places as Walsgrave on Sowe and Coundon, where the proportion of smallholdings in 1279 was high, at 48 per cent with 7 acres or below, compared with only 10 per cent of such tenants on its more rural manors. The numbers of suburban smallholdings on the Priory estate declined subsequently, but still amounted to 38 per cent of the total in 1411. ⁴³ The names of the tenants in 1279 give a few indications of connections between them and the adjoining Coventry. Among Walsgrave tenants, Henry Taylor, may be the same Henry Taylor who held property in the city. William le Cooper and Ralph le Feur (Smith) of the same village are not listed as urban tenants, but may have supplied city customers with barrels and ironwork. ⁴⁴ In the suburb of Gloucester on the eastern side of the city that belonged to Gloucester Abbey in 1266–7 the names of two weavers, a parchment maker, baker, dyer, wheelwright, skinner, and fuller suggest an interaction between the smallholders and cottages of Barton Street, Brook Street, and Newland and those living within the walls. Likewise, the smallholders in the northern suburb of Worcester in 1299 belonging to the manor of Northwick included a baker, collier, tiler, smith, hooper, and plumber. A century earlier, when occupational surnames were scarce, we still find a parchment maker, smith, and potter. ⁴⁵ The relatively low pressure on space in Worcester’s northern suburbs attracted the potters and tile makers who could dig for clay. In all of the examples we have examined there was scope for small-scale agriculture and horticulture, with opportunities to graze animals on extramural pastures, so the dwellers of the suburbs retained connections with the peasant way of life. The inhabitants on the urban fringe no doubt gained less than those within the walls, but they need not have feared poverty, as some were pursuing some well-rewarded crafts.

Gathering and scavenging on commons and in woods cannot be regarded as industrial, but they should be mentioned in a survey of non-agricultural activities, especially if they contributed to the supply of fuel and raw materials for artisans. The resources of the commons were especially important for the cottagers who often lived on the edge of woods and wastes. The courts sought to licence and control gathering activity, for example for thorns and furze, which were cut and carried for hedging materials and fuel. They were concerned that overuse would endanger supplies for the community. Outsiders who had no right on the common were taking vegetation for sale, leading at Stoke Prior (Worcestershire) in 1400 to an order to find out who was cutting furze and gorse in the heath. ⁴⁶ Rushes, gathered for strewing in the household were being taken for sale. In 1435 at Upton Warren (Worcestershire) Cristina, wife of John Walker, and the wife of Nicholas Sharp, were carrying rushes out of the parish and selling them in Worcester, it was said for 4s 0d. One of the women was the wife of a smallholder. ⁴⁷ Brief reference should also be made to peasants as hunters. Pursuit of deer and other beasts of the chase were prohibited under forest law in royal forests and many lords had rights of free warren which protected smaller game. Peasants were occasionally accused under forest law of setting out with bows and dogs to kill deer but more often they are seen to be opportunists, taking advantage of finds of dead or wounded deer, which they took back to their homes. They sold the carcasses, contributing to the illicit trade in venison. Peasants probably aspired to be hunters, and equipped themselves with arrows with heads suitable for shooting game (which are found in excavations), and accompanied by their dogs sometimes infringed the lords’ privilege of warren by taking rabbits and game birds. This was on a very small scale, as they consumed negligible quantities of meat from wild animals and birds, judging from the scarcity of game among bones recovered from peasant sites. ⁴⁸

Spinning and brewing could also supplement the incomes of country people with limited resources. Clothmaking was ever-present as a rural craft which expanded in episodes between 1350 and the early sixteenth century with growth both in exports and home demand. Around 1540 approximately 142,000 spinners would be employed in England, or 16 per cent of the female population over the age of 12. ⁴⁹ If 5 per cent of English cloth was produced in the west midlands, 7,000 workers, mainly women, would have been engaged in spinning, but as most of them worked part-time, the total making some contribution would have exceeded 10,000. The numbers would be smaller in 1400 or 1300 as rather less cloth was produced in the countryside, but still thousands of peasant households would have been gaining income from this source. These calculations are all based on woollen cloth, but linen manufacture provided employment for many spinners as thousands of yards of linen were made every year. Spinning was so commonplace, so firmly bound into the routine of households, that it receives little notice in documents. Daily life depicted in misericords often included a woman with a distaff, such as one from Ripple (Worcestershire) showing a couple sitting at their fireside, with the woman spinning in her ‘leisure’ time. Spindle whorls, discs of lead, stone or bone that weighted the end of the spindle, are found in excavations of west-midland peasant settlements, with four at Pinbury, nine at Upton, eight at Dassett Southend and three at Coton (a community of poor cottars). ⁵⁰ Lead whorls are also found in fields, in one case from the Forest of Dean. ⁵¹ Spinning wheels were included in the inventories of cottage tenants, like Richard Sclatter of Elmley Castle in 1457. Wealthier tenants also owned them, perhaps to add another strand to their many sources of income, but the money generated by spinning made a real difference to the income of cottagers. ⁵² If the spinners or rather spinsters kept their earnings, the craft gave women the potential for some small measure of financial independence.

The brewing and selling of ale was quite commonly pursued by relatively wealthy households as a means of making profitable use of their surplus of grain. Brewing gave the wives of well-off tenants the opportunity to develop a business of their own. Smallholders and other poorer producers, such as widows, operated under the disadvantage of having to buy their malting grains. However, if they could not afford expensive brewing equipment, it could be hired, like the brewing lead at Overbury in the 1420s made available for 2 ½d. ⁵³ Those too poor to brew could still participate in the trade by acting as tranters, retailing the ale brewed by others.

There is clearly a connection between poverty (or at least the prospect of poverty) and non-agricultural work. Potting and fishing could attract the landless, and cottagers and smallholders can be identified spinning, brewing, and gathering thorns and rushes. The tenants of smallholdings also included many skilled workers, notably in the suburban settlements outside large towns. The woods offered chances for unskilled workers preparing fuel for industries and households. However, the people who used the fuel were often workers with skills, equipment, and buildings who expected more from manufacturing than merely to achieve self-sufficiency.

Industry within peasant society

In exploring peasant industries that were not promoted by lords, managed by urban entrepreneurs, or practised by smallholders and the landless, a starting point is provided by royal forests and woodland landscapes in general.

The Forest of Dean covered thirty-three parishes in the far west of Gloucestershire, and supported the largest concentration of industry in the west midlands (Figure 2.10). Its natural resources combined thousands of acres of woods with geological deposits rich in minerals. Industries in Dean had deep historical roots, and expanded in the thirteenth century. In 1282 the lease of iron-ore mines brought £46 to the crown. The medieval mines of Dean were not just the simple bell pits found elsewhere, but deep trenches and tunnels which needed to be propped with timber. They were worked by privileged free miners who had rights of access and were able to take trees, according to customs defined in the later Middle Ages, but which went back to the thirteenth century. The ore was roasted and crushed (by ‘stamping’) before being smelted in forges, of which forty-three were reported in 1270 and sixty in 1282, falling to forty-nine in 1317 and thirty-three in the 1430s. In addition, cinders left from earlier workings were smelted. The fuel for smelting, wood charcoal, was prepared in pits of which 2,685 were recorded in the royal demesne woods in 1282. Not all of the iron ore was processed in the forest, and thousands of loads were carried to the banks of the Wye and Severn to be carried by boat to be smelted elsewhere. Coal was also mined for export from the Forest. ⁵⁴

All of these activities required a prodigious amount of timber and wood, so that the royal enquiry of 1282 found thousands of stumps of oak and beech trees which had been felled for charcoal burning and other purposes. There was much complaint at the damage to the woods, especially by felling that had not received permission from the forest authorities; however, some woods survived. Timber was worked into building timber, barrels, cartwheels, and boats, and the bark sold for tanning. Lime bark (bast) was made into rope. The underwood was cut for fuel and fencing. Both timber and wood were taken out of the Forest by the roads leading eastwards to Gloucester, and by boat from river ports, of which twelve were recorded on the Severn and Wye in 1282. ⁵⁵ They connected Dean both upriver to Gloucester and Worcester, and downstream to Bristol. As well as wood products and the output of the mines, the boats carried illicit venison for the wealthy households of Bristol. The numerous coal mines produced the fuel for the manufacture of ironwares. Large quantities of crossbow bolts, horseshoes, and agricultural implements came from the ironworks of Dean for widespread distribution. Dean iron was manufactured into wire, knives, and implements of all kinds in Gloucester. Quarries in the Forest were a source of sandstone for building, limestone for burning into lime (using local coal), specialized stones for millstones and grindstones, and oxide and ochre to make red and yellow paint. ⁵⁶ Not all industries were related to the specialized resources of the Forest, as at least six fulling mills served the clothmakers in or near to the forest. ⁵⁷

Some of the many tasks itemized here were carried out by specialist workers, such as the free miners, and there would have been much wage work associated with the forges, the mines, and charcoal burning. In 1282 when the crown needed experienced tree fellers to open up routes for new roads for the campaigns in north Wales, they found a hundred recruits in Dean, presumably men who normally worked for wages. ⁵⁸

Peasant artisans offended against the vert in the Forest by taking trees, building houses, digging marl pits, and making enclosures. Those named were usually landholders, who were breaking forest law in pursuit of both their agricultural and industrial work. In Dean in 1282 the offenders included a carpenter, a cooper, two charcoal burners, three smiths, and a roper, judging from their occupational surnames. There were also textile workers, two weavers, a shearman, and a tailor. Those involved in the food trades as butcher, baker, and cook may have been trading with the forest workers, as charcoal burners, miners, and quarrymen needed to be fed. ⁵⁹ Peasants were equipped for hauling with carts, and some owned ox-drawn wains suited for carrying heavy timber. In the specialized and concentrated industrial scene of Dean, there was plenty of scope for the peasant to become involved in manufacture, or to provide services.

The Forest of Feckenham in north Worcestershire and west Warwickshire lacked Dean’s tracts of land covered with large trees, and the underlying geology was not rich in minerals apart from the salt deposits at Droitwich. However there was still an impressive range of occupations in the records of the 1270s and 1280s. Setting aside the artisans from the town of Alcester (two smiths, a carpenter and a wheelwright) in order to focus on rural crafts, fifteen occupations can be identified from the surnames, with six charcoal burners, six smiths, an arrow smith, a lorimer (making iron horse bits), together with woodworkers: a carpenter, cooper, hooper, and sawyer. Clothmakers included three weavers, and a shearman, and there was also a potter and roper. Food traders, a baker, and four cooks, also offended against forest law. ⁶⁰ The offences committed by all of these people with occupational surnames arose from their holding of land, so if they were still pursuing the occupations from which they took their names, they belonged to the dual economy. From woodlands outside royal forests specialist woodworkers produced items for particular niches in the market. Ladders were being made at Romsley (Worcestershire) in 1485, and yokes in 1382 at Bisley (Gloucestershire). Hurdle making was a feature of the woodlands of Hawkesbury (Gloucestershire). ⁶¹

Industrial activity spread over quite a large area of north-west Warwickshire, north-east Worcestershire, extending into south Staffordshire. This territory was adjacent to royal forests, but can be characterized as a woodland landscape with a combination of rather poor quality arable (oats were much grown), pasture, heath, and some wood. Land was often held in small hedged crofts. At the centre lay the town of Birmingham and its suburb of Deritend, with a population in 1300 of 1,250, and probably near to 2,000 in the early sixteenth century (see ‘Peasants and changing fortunes of towns’ in Chapter 8). The area was connected by road to the coal mines of Pensnett, Dudley, and Halesowen to the west. Drove roads from the west brought cattle from north Wales and then on to London, and wool came from Shropshire. Eastwards roads went to Coventry, the regional capital, but also to the east coast ports. Grain came from the south, from the Avon Valley, and roads to the south-west connected it to the Severn and ultimately Bristol by boat. The area was most famous for its smiths and other ironworkers, and it produced many blades, notably for scythes, knives, and weapon bills, but tanners and clothmakers were important. The application of water power for sharpening blades is found at neighbouring Halesowen as early as 1346, when Hugh le Cotiler was using a water mill to sharpen knives and axes. ⁶² Mills are recorded in the early sixteenth century on the small River Rea and lesser streams near to Birmingham including two fulling mills and a number of blade mills. Artisans, often just individuals, and industrial mills worked in the villages around Birmingham, at Aston, Bordesley, Edgbaston, Erdington, Handsworth, Harborne, Northfield, and Yardley. ⁶³ When the central government needed iron wares and especially bills for infantry soldiers in 1511–13 they negotiated with men based in Birmingham, but also with William Smyth of Bickenhill to the east, and Richard Parkys of Sedgley to the west. The wooden poles on which the bill heads were fitted were supplied by William Bradford of Hanbury in Feckenham Forest. ⁶⁴

A varied and adaptable society seems to have developed at King’s Norton, 5 miles south-west of Birmingham under the remote lordship of the crown, which meant that the inhabitants enjoyed relative freedom, and held land under the customs of ancient demesne. Various lesser lords and church institutions held sub-manors which wielded limited power over tenants. King’s Norton people demonstrated their independent spirit by defending common rights if outsiders encroached. ⁶⁵ Their settlements were dispersed, and their lands included some open field but much enclosure, as well as the common pastures and heaths. King’s Norton lay in the parish of Bromsgrove, but its religious life was centred on a chapel which grew in size to accommodate the population of a thousand, and became larger than most parish churches. Next to the chapel was an open space, the Green, surrounded by houses and probably the venue for an unchartered market. Leland, visiting in the early sixteenth century mentioned wool staplers living near the church. Clergy attached to the chapel taught in a school. ⁶⁶ In the late thirteenth century, surnames indicate nine non-agricultural occupations, and more reliable descriptions of trades and crafts around 1500 record a total of fourteen. Mercers, drapers, and food traders were included, but also artisans: textile workers, makers of clothing, a shoemaker, a tanner, a carpenter, a wheelwright, and smith. Ceramic tiles were made and traded as far as Stratford-upon-Avon. Pastoral farming had apparently developed a commercial speciality, as the prior of Worcester in 1535 was buying King’s Norton cheese. ⁶⁷

A great quantity of imported Spanish iron came to King’s Norton from Bristol, by boat (trow) up the Severn, and by cart overland, probably from the river port of Bewdley. These cargoes are recorded in 1539 and 1540, but the trade was well established by then. Richard Chamber, yeoman, received 11 tons, and William Reynolds 3 tons, the two men paying almost £60 in total for the iron over two years. ⁶⁸ Chamber and Reynolds were presumably middlemen who sold smaller parcels of the metal to working artisans. Their customers could well have been smiths and cutlers in Birmingham and the nearby villages. The Spanish iron was of a high quality, and was used for specialized products, perhaps in combination with cheaper metal from the west midlands. Even artisans on the fringes of Dean with abundant nearby sources of iron had uses for Spanish iron. ⁶⁹

Turning from concentrations of industrial activity, the scatter of peasant craftsmen over the countryside were well placed to respond to the needs of their neighbours for building workers, those making textiles and clothing, and suppliers of food and drink.

Building workers are traditionally headed by the masons. They were quite thinly and unevenly spread. For example, there were twenty people with the Mason or Machom surname in Gloucestershire paying tax in 1327 compared with thirty-two carpenters. In the sixty-seven villages covered by the poll tax records in 1381 only five masons were identified. ⁷⁰ A growing number of peasant houses from the thirteenth century onwards were built on stone foundations, and a minority had stone walls up the eaves, but the mainly low walls of rubble without lime mortar would not have taken much of the mason’s time. Their main sources of work were high status ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and urban buildings. A mason with a long-term engagement with an aristocratic employer was John Monfort, who worked on the earl of Warwick’s castle at Elmley (Worcestershire) and in 1382 acquired a cottage, a croft, and three selions. Such masons with smallholdings form another category of peasant artisans. Some masons supplied stone as well as working and laying it, and at Elmley they obtained licences to open a quarry. The quarries were small in size, for example, one on Bredon Hill measured 40 feet by 40 feet. ⁷¹ Rural carpenters were often employed on high-status and urban buildings, but a high proportion of their work was done for peasants. This helps to explain their numbers, and their tendency to be based in the country. Combining two documents, an eyre roll and a lay subsidy, both compiled in 1275, twenty-nine carpenters are listed for Worcestershire, only three of whom lived in a town (for comparison, only nine Mason or Macun names, three of them urban, appear in the same sources) (Figure 9.5). Similarly, fifteen of the twenty carpenters named as taxpayers in Warwickshire in 1332 were rural. ⁷²

Figure 9.5 Masons and carpenters in Worcestershire in 1275 (source: note 72)

They tended to be based in woodland landscapes, though in the poll tax of 1381 thirteen taxpayers described as carpenters appeared in Cotswold villages. A notable feature of the poll taxes was the clustering of carpenters, with groups near Coventry at Bulkington and Stivichall (see ‘Occupations and commerce’ in Chapter 8). Three of them can also be found at some distance from a town, for example at Bibury (Gloucestershire). ⁷³ Perhaps the consumers benefited from a group of carpenters operating in one place, and likely to compete over price and quality of service. There might have been advantages for the carpenters in being able occasionally to work together. They often did minor jobs which took only a few days, but the carpenter who was paid 6s 8d for extensive repairs to a peasant house and barn at Whatcote in 1443–4 probably worked for sixteen days (at 5d per day). ⁷⁴ Most carpenters worked as individuals, were widely spaced across the country, and consequently travelled quite long distances to work.

Carpenters demonstrated their technical skills and their accomplishments in design in work that still survives in the form of standing buildings. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the adoption of a number of innovations that seem to be interconnected. Stone foundations were widely adopted, and in some circumstances stone walls to full height were being constructed. Timbers were neatly cut from the tree in a systematic conversion into a squared form which could then be assembled with mortice and tenon joints into a timber frame. In the west midlands crucks provided the basis of the frame, and they were fixed in a horizontal sill beam, or stood on padstones, or were embedded in a stone wall. Once the cruck-based timber frame and stone walls had been adopted, carpenters worked within that method of construction, which may have limited their scope for individual choice in layout and technique. However no two buildings were identical and each craftsman solved constructional problems in slightly different ways. For example, a variety of methods were used to join pairs of cruck blades together at the apex of the roof. Some carpenters employed unusual joints requiring considerable skill, such as the ‘joggled halvings’ in one Warwickshire house. ⁷⁵ The arrangement of timbers could vary, with the use of curved braces in addition to the geometric squares of conventional framing, and the occasional extravagant use of timber in close studding. In deciding on the design of a house the carpenter was consulting with the client who was commissioning the work.

Although they displayed much skill, carpenters did not enjoy a high status in the hierarchy of crafts. They appear in court stealing trees, and had a reputation for unreliability, by failing to do agreed work. William atte Toun of Mathon in the 1380s and 1390s did not just let a client down, but also seems to have threatened a neighbour. ⁷⁶ Some may have depended entirely on the earnings of their craft, but they could hold quite large amounts of land. Some were smallholders, like the carpenter with a cottage and 4 acres at Elmley Castle, but William atte Toun, a serf, seems to have been tenant of a yardland. In 1384 a carpenter of Madresfield (Worcestershire) was granted freehold lands in Madresfield and Baldenhale (part of Malvern) consisting of many pieces of land including a close, 17 selions, 5 dayworks, and 5 butts. Three years later he was told to pay in the manor court an unusually punitive amercement of 10s for felling and carrying off timber from land he held from the lord of Madresfield in order to build a house on a piece of land that he had purchased. He may have offended his lord, but he was also making full use of his lands. ⁷⁷

New rural buildings were mostly thatched, and roofs needed frequent repair and maintenance. The thatchers’ craft was not as specialized as others in the building trade, and it was not a frequent occupational description. Slaters and tilers, who covered the roofs of high status or urban buildings with stone slates and ceramic tiles had a higher profile, and they appear in the poll tax and holding land in the villages. Only a small proportion of peasant houses were provided with these expensive roofs, though sometimes the louvre or smoke vent on a thatched roof was surrounded by a patch of slates or tiles to prevent fire.

Roofing slates had to be quarried in places with suitable stone, and the products of Cotswold villages such as Guiting and Snowshill were sent over a wide area. At Cleeve Prior (Worcestershire) the local limestone, lias, was probably being exploited before 1350, but it first attracted official attention in 1357 when tenants were ordered not to sell stone slates without the lord’s licence. In 1365 the requirement for a licence was extended to include the extraction of the stone as well as the sale of the slates. ⁷⁸ The lord was not opposing the industry, but expected to make money from it. From 1386 until 1421 individuals were amerced for digging slates. Of the seven offenders reported in 1387 three held yardlands, and another three half-yardlands with additional acres, so quarrying had become a sideline for relatively well-off tenants. ⁷⁹ Presumably employees were doing the actual quarrying and slate making. It later became clear that the source of the stone was not a distant hillside, but strips of arable land in the open fields, where the stone lay near the surface. Eventually, in the 1390s, the offending tenants agreed to seek the lord’s licence. In 1392 one of the four tenants digging stone paid 2s 4d to make and sell 1,000 slates and in the next year another tenant was told to pay 6d for the sale of three cartloads of slates. The lord’s licence fee in 1406 cost seven tenants, some of whom were selling building stone rather than slates, a total of 9s 10d. ⁸⁰ The lord’s intervention shows us the scale of the industry, which was clearly able to send many thousands of slates onto the market. Perhaps the licence fees were set at a level which allowed the lord a share of the revenues without discouraging the industry. The tenants seem to have decided that they were paying too much, withdrew their cooperation, and paid no fees, which led the lord in 1406 to ask for an enquiry as to who was digging stone. The lord meanwhile shifted his grounds for intervening which must initially have been based on asserting his mineral rights, but in 1421 the quarries were said to be on servile land, which the lord claimed to control. A new objection to quarrying in 1420–1 was concern about damage to the fields, and tenants were told to restore the land so that it could be cultivated again. ⁸¹

To sum up, a considerable proportion of Cleeve Prior tenants, nine in one year (1421) extracted stone for roofing slates from quarries on strips in the open fields. The profits were not very large, as a thousand slates would have sold for about 5s, but it was evidently worthwhile, especially if the lord’s licence fees could be avoided. Cereals were becoming less profitable, and the cultivators of Cleeve were leaving parts of the arable unplanted (see ‘Arable to pasture’ in Chapter 6) The episode illustrates peasant adaptability, as an accident of geology gave them the opportunity, and they acquired new skills, or recruited skilled workers, and perhaps developed distribution and marketing networks. The production of slates was an example of peasants responding to consumer demand, as townspeople and a few peasants turned from thatch to expensive but durable and fire-proof roofing materials. Ceramic roofing tiles were made in woodland production centres, including Baddesley Clinton, Hanley Castle, and King’s Norton, all of which supplied towns. Coventry was served by a large-scale production site on its outskirts at Stoke. ⁸²

The building industry in general remained active because demand moved from one social group to another. Elite buildings needed a large labour force before about 1280, but after that castles and monasteries gradually reduced their programmes of construction. Peasant buildings enjoyed a boom in the period 1380–1500, nor were timber buildings in some towns being neglected in the period 1430–90, so this could have been a good time to be a carpenter. The workers were often based in the country and followed dual occupations, combining their craft with a peasant holding.

A trade in cloth aimed at local consumers is implied by the drapers and draperies (groups of stalls) in market towns. A few drapers lived in the country, according to the 1379 poll tax at the small and otherwise primarily agricultural Warwickshire village of Radbourne and also at Birdingbury not far away. Richard Calwe of Northfield (Worcestershire), a rural draper was reported to be the victim of robbery in 1445, in which he claimed to have lost cash totalling £6 and possessions including 2 yards of blanket, a relatively cheap woollen. The stolen items included a gown of must devylers, which was an imported cloth from Montivilliers in Normandy, and probably the draper’s own rather superior clothing. ⁸³ Less affluent consumers might have bought Welsh cloth or the cheap woollens from Kendal in the north-west. The favoured colours were blue and russet (grey).

Rural clothmaking is made visible by references to fulling mills, some of which paid rents to manorial lords. Fullers could be pursuing their trade while cultivating land, like the fuller at Eastington (Gloucestershire) in 1439 who held 14 acres. ⁸⁴ The significance of mills should not be exaggerated. Lords did not initiate an industry by building a mill, but rather the lord’s officials noticed weavers at work, and seized the opportunity to gain revenue. Mills might also be built by local people who paid rent for use of the water. ⁸⁵ Once established, the mill could encourage further advances in cloth making. The intense development of the Stroud district, with at least thirty mills, could not be matched in any other part of the region, but at various times a total of 112 mills are known to have existed, and that is a minimum (see Figure 9.3). Loose groupings can be seen in the western part of the Forest of Dean, in the valley of the Coln in south Gloucestershire, along the rivers Stour and Avon in Warwickshire, and the Stour and Severn in Worcestershire, and in villages around Birmingham. Mills were not just serving their immediate vicinity, and a weaver is known to have travelled 17 miles to have his cloth fulled.

Tailors and shepsters (female dressmakers) made contact with their rural clients by establishing themselves in market towns, but also in the country. The surname ‘tailor’ is found in nineteen rural locations in Worcestershire in 1275, and many others would have been too poor to contribute to the tax. ⁸⁶ Later records reveal tailors and shepsters in nineteen villages among the sixty-seven in the surviving Gloucestershire 1381 poll tax records, including two tailors at Chedworth, a tailor and two shepsters at Up Ampney, and three tailors at Dowdeswell. ⁸⁷ In the Warwickshire poll tax of 1379 of ninety-one villages documented, fifteen contained tailors, with two each in three places, but in this list most crafts were undercounted. To explain these numbers, which are comparable with smiths and carpenters, many peasants evidently expected their clothes to be made by specialists. The dialogue between customer and craftsperson might have led to shifts in fashion in rural clothing. Unlike some peasant societies, English countrymen kept up with the new styles, as we find men’s garments described mainly as tunics until the late fourteenth century, and after that they were wearing gowns, doublets, and coats. This meant that they moved from loose clothes to the tight-fitting styles which had been adopted originally at the royal court. ⁸⁸ The tailors were adept at keeping one foot in the world of fashion, and another in the soil, as they are found holding land, and not just smallholdings. A fifteenth-century Churcham (Gloucestershire) tailor was also described as a husbandman and a yeoman. ⁸⁹

Woollen cloth seizes our attention because it has such a high profile in the life of the region and the nation. Yet linen undergarments were much worn, and no bed was complete without linen sheets, made from spun flax fibres, or hurden sheets woven from hemp. Flax and hemp were widely grown in small quantities, which means that they feature as a minor item in valuations of tithes. They were prominent in woodland landscapes, leading to the sale of the flax and hemp tithe at Wootton Wawen (Warwickshire) in 1453 for 22s 1d; this implies that the whole crop was valued at £11, which might mean at least 30 acres devoted to these crops. ⁹⁰ At Hanbury in Worcestershire and other woodland villages, parcels of common pasture were planted with flax, and more widely flax and hemp were grown in gardens or enclosed crofts. ⁹¹ The widespread cultivation of the two crops is evident from the complaints of the pollution caused by retting the plants in streams and ponds, to separate the fibres. Equipment for preparing yarn from the fibres, heckles (combs with metal teeth), and spinning wheels, appear in inventories, but linen weaving is sparsely recorded. A rare example was Thomas le Webbe of Cleeve Prior, who was the subject of a complaint in 1357 that he had detained 3 ells of linen cloth promised to John Bell of Bidford-on-Avon (Warwickshire). ⁹² Linen weaving leaves no material traces, apart from a glass smoother for finishing linen found in the excavations of a rural settlement at Goldicote (Warwickshire). ⁹³ The production of linen might have had a low profile because it was a commonplace small-scale part-time activity in many villages, in which, as in the Thomas le Webbe case, the weaver sold cloth direct to customers. If women played a large part in linen weaving as well as spinning, this would have been a factor in the craft’s invisibility. Although not much co-ordination by entrepreneurs is apparent, the occasional rural mercer (who traditionally dealt in non-woollen textiles) is mentioned, and the surname Linendraper appears at Alcester in the thirteenth century, so perhaps there was some marketing of the cloth by middlemen (see ‘Occupations and commerce’ in Chapter 8).

In considering the long-term changes in demand for cloth in the region, although between the 1340s and the 1520s the numbers of those buying and wearing cloth declined, people may have bought more per head and demanded higher quality textiles. Support for this suggestion comes from the sumptuary laws of 1363–1533 alleging that the lower ranks of society were wearing clothes previously associated with their social superiors, but does this prejudiced source mean that clothing standards were generally rising? The west-midland maintenance agreements for retired tenants occasionally promised new garments annually, and tell us something about the clothes and their value, but they do not indicate an increase in expenditure on textiles or garments. This may be a problem of this source, which was concerned with defining minimum provisions (see ‘Peasants and changing urban fortunes’ in Chapter 8). Perhaps the best indication of rising demand for cloth comes from the new fulling mills built in the fifteenth century, which were part of a national trend for more industrial mills. In England as a whole, the percentage of mills used in industry grew from 6 per cent of the total around 1300 to 23 per cent in the 1530s. In the west midlands the increase was more modest, in the same span of time from 3.5 per cent to 11 per cent. ⁹⁴ The regional difference can be explained in the modest size of the west-midland cloth industry compared with the intensity of clothmaking found in Berkshire, Kent, and Wiltshire, where many fulling mills came into operation in response to rising cloth exports. Nonetheless the healthy state of mechanical fulling in the west midlands would be compatible with an appetite among consumers in the region for more and better clothing.

Only three shoemakers appear in the villages covered by the poll tax, and a few more feature in manorial court records. Clothing could be mended, altered, even made at home, as is shown by finds in excavations of scissors, shears, needles, and thimbles. Making shoes would have been a greater challenge and most shoes would have been bought in market towns. Leather workers in general were scarce in the west midland countryside, with a single glover recorded at Shustoke in Warwickshire, and only a few instances of skinners sometimes revealing their unwelcome presence by cleaning sheepskins and fouling the water in a stream. ⁹⁵

Consumption of freshwater fish expanded in the later Middle Ages, in parallel with the demand for meat. Throughout the period the rents paid for pond and river fisheries reflect the profits that could be made from selling the catch. Two lessees were willing in 1329 to pay £13 6s 8d per annum for a large pond at Lapworth (Warwickshire), which would enable them to take pike, bream, tench, perch, roach, and eels. ⁹⁶ A very high rent, £20 in 1506, was paid for Framilode weir on the Severn, with a potential for large catches of salmon and lampreys. Most river fisheries carried a lesser rent, but the sums were equivalent to a middling holding of land. For example, 13s 4d was paid for two lengthy stretches of the river Avon at Welford-on-Avon (Warwickshire), by two prominent local tenants in 1450. Similar rents for fisheries on the same river further downstream at Cleeve Prior, again attracting peasant lessees, remained at much the same level through the depression of the mid-fifteenth century, suggesting a sustained demand for fish. ⁹⁷ Tenants were attracted to acquire fishing rights in minor streams, like the Bow Brook at Walcot in Allesborough (Worcestershire) for 20d rent. ⁹⁸ A steady flow of complaints about illicit fishing shows that poachers realized that they could make quick profits from catching and selling fish, from rivers and ponds which could not be closely policed.

Among the fishing techniques practised, the most drastic employed at Adlestrop in 1402 (and elsewhere) was to build a temporary dam across a stream, and take the fish that were penned in behind it, though the lessees of the fishery had to be reminded to remove the dam afterwards to prevent floods. ⁹⁹ On larger rivers, as at Tidenham, weirs or fences were designed to direct the fish into basket-work traps, and the weirs attached to mills traditionally were used to catch eels. The use of ‘machines’ and ‘engines’ (presumably traps or just nets) was regulated by manor courts. It was probably the fear that efficient devices might endanger stocks, that led the authorities at Brandon (Warwickshire) in 1475 to order that no tenant should fish in the lord’s ‘several waters’ except with ‘an angle rod’. ¹⁰⁰ As well as leasing fisheries from lords, peasants in some circumstances could create their own fishponds. The large parish of Tanworth-in-Arden (Warwickshire) is known to have contained twenty fishponds, some of which seem to have been made by peasants, notably John Smith who in 1332 acquired an open ditch which he converted into a pond by damming a water course. It was later called Smythespool. ¹⁰¹

All of those with access to fisheries aimed at supplying the market rather than obtaining fish for domestic consumption. Peasants probably ate eels and small fish, but their main ambition was to catch the larger species which would be consumed by aristocratic, monastic, and wealthy urban households. Salmon and pike had a high status but other species fetched good prices. The Trinity Guild at Coventry gave a lavish breakfast in March 1458 (in Lent) and served bream which cost 18d each, and they paid 5d, 8d, and 10d each for tench. ¹⁰²

The rural food and drink trades enabled peasants to enhance the profits from agricultural produce, aiming at peasant consumers. In the court records bakers appear sporadically and in small numbers, paying amercements for selling loaves of low weight. Butchers are rather more commonly encountered, normally appearing before the court for selling meat at excessive profit (see ‘Marketing animals’ in Chapter 7). Some villagers probably bought both meat and bread in towns, though urban bakers would visit villages (see ‘Occupations and commerce’ in Chapter 8). Most peasant households did not need to buy loaves because they baked their own bread, either in ovens in their house or bakehouse, or in the common oven. Bakers and butchers presented to the manor courts were often landholders, and can therefore be regarded as part of the dual economy. Cooks were mainly town-based, but in Eldersfield in 1390 Edward and Roger Viteler (a significant name) were making and selling pies. ¹⁰³

Large numbers participated in brewing ale, many of them women. They were regulated in price, the use of measures, and quality. The authorities wished to make sales accessible, by insisting that a stake was placed outside the alehouse when ale was available, and sometimes they attempted to establish a rota of brewers. It seems that every seller of ale, both the brewers and the tranters who bought ale from the brewers and sold it, was liable to pay a small sum (often 2d–4d) supposedly for breaking the rules, but really as a tax on trading. In an increasingly common practice, a frequent brewer paid an annual sum (perhaps 12d) for exemption from a succession of small fines.

Numbers of brewers varied greatly between places, and from year to year. The court of a large manor in its peak years, like Hawkesbury (Gloucestershire) in the 1390s, would deal with thirty-five brewers in a year. ¹⁰⁴ Elsewhere there might be only four. Men were named as brewers, but were usually being made responsible for their wives’ breaches of the rules, and the women were named in the court when they were widows or single women. Numbers of brewers tended to fall in the fifteenth century, suggesting not a decline in ale production or drinking but a concentration of the trade in fewer hands, with more specialization and a more pronounced commercialism. Brewers included all ranks of village society, from better-off tenants to landless. At Cleeve Prior in 1405–6 two women, one a widow, and six men were named. Three of the brewers were yardlanders, one was a smallholder, and probably two others held some land. One seems to have been a tenant’s son who at one time worked as the lord’s swineherd. ¹⁰⁵

The larger scale brewers were supplementing their incomes by selling part of their grain surplus. Two tenants with large holdings at Hampton Lucy (Warwickshire) in 1516–17 each brewed 12 quarters of malt in a year, enough to make 720 gallons, so if the ale was sold at 1d per gallon their turnover would have been £3 in a year. ¹⁰⁶ They was probably really selling more gallons than they admitted at more than 1d. At the other end of the social spectrum brewing and ale-selling could bring a modest income to a poor household (‘Poverty and industry’ in this chapter).

The alehouses were dwelling houses in which drink was sold. At Burton Dassett Southend such an establishment of the fifteenth century has been excavated and identified by the number of cups found in or near to the house, made of Cistercian ware, the new glazed pottery of the late fifteenth century. The design of the house was unusual with an upper storey reached by an external staircase, and a one-bay hall with a hearth in the corner where the ale may have been served. ¹⁰⁷ The alehouses attracted customers by providing space where dice, cards, and other games could be played, though in the view of respectable villagers the establishments encouraged gambling, idleness, and worse when suspicious women were present.

Ale varied in strength, quality, and flavour. Traditionally it was brewed from drage in the champion, barley on the wolds and in the lower Severn valley, and oats in the north of the region. Towards the end of our period, in 1491–2, in the vicinity of Bristol at Almondsbury, the lord of the manor gave the haymakers bread, cheese, butter, and beef, accompanied by cervisia bera, meaning beer, a hopped drink originally from the Low Countries and probably spreading from the cosmopolitan port of Bristol. ¹⁰⁸ The drink was presumably bought from a brewer in the village, showing that it was spreading through the countryside. Beer, already popular in eastern England, had arrived and was now about to conquer the west, turning the craft into an industry. ¹⁰⁹

Conclusion

Peasants participated in non-agricultural activities, loosely called industries, and even played an initiating role. Their contribution can be described, but cannot easily be quantified. The 1381 poll tax for Gloucestershire, the record nearest to an occupational census, suggests that 26 per cent of the male population were engaged in some form of industry. This includes both town and country. If the urban element is set aside, the percentage falls to 14 per cent. This is a misleading understatement. The tax records fifty rural brewers, which is a clearly low count for sixty-seven villages. At Kempsford the poll tax identifies three brewers, but the court rolls of 1376–7 name fourteen of them. The comparable figures from Bibury were one brewer in the poll tax and nine in the court records. ¹¹⁰ The tax assessors must have noted the most persistent or the most prominent brewers only, or those exhibiting their ale stake on the day of the assessment. The rest would be entered in the tax list as cultores (cultivators), thus hiding from view at least three hundred households with significant involvement in the craft.

The size of the industrial sector would be much expanded if the women identified as wives without reference to an occupation could be included. Wives were active in tasks alongside their husbands, as weaving for example needed two pairs of hands, or they could have practised some completely different skill. The tax collectors cannot be expected to reflect part-time work such as spinning or wood cutting in their one-word occupational descriptions.

Lords made a contribution to industrial development, by building fulling mills, by opening up quarries, developing iron forges, and contributing to the infrastructure of roads, bridges, and ports. Urban entrepreneurs and middlemen marketed the products of pottery kilns and ironworks, and above all co-ordinated the various processes that went into the large scale cloth production in the Stroudwater and Dursley districts. The numerous small-scale industries were not refuges from desperate poverty, but were created by independent producers who developed pottery manufacture, or were able to cultivate flax and hemp and weave linen without being dominated by town-based middlemen. They combined skilled craftsmanship with trade in commodities, so the carpenters from the woodlands provided timber for their buildings. They began a new industry in the Cleeve Prior slate quarries, made their own fish ponds, and took up the new craft of beer brewing. The enterprise shown by an isolated craftsman in an unexpected place deserves to be noticed. The lord of Tysoe (Warwickshire) in 1465–6 was rebuilding his windmill, and needed a brass bearing. He would surely have had to commission a specialist founder or bellyeter in a big town? The skills that he needed could be found in the village of Alderminster, where John Tyngker earned his living normally as a tinker, repairing pots and pans in nearby villages. ¹¹¹

The best way to assess the importance of industry in peasant society would not be to count the specialist artisans like John Tyngker and calculate them as a percentage of the population, but to estimate the amount of time spent throughout the population on agricultural and non-agricultural tasks. Tyngker might have devoted half of his hours on metalworking, but a weaver spent more time at the loom, while an occasional brewster might produce ale on average a few hours per week. Children, always part of the workforce, helped to make pots. Any figure from these speculations would be impressionistic, but it would be surprising if less than a third of peasants’ working time was engaged in non-agricultural tasks. The proportion of rural incomes gained from non-agricultural sources in 1500 has been estimated at 20 per cent. ¹¹²

The other significance of peasant industry was that it put down markers for future development. The theme of this chapter has been innovation: large scale rural clothmaking; the package of techniques used in cruck building; expanding use of stone as a building material; the diffusion of smiths and villages; and the changes in design and quality in rural pottery making, all involved peasant artisans and entrepreneurs of peasant origin. In industry, as in farming, peasants could be initiators.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0009

¹ R. Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, American Historical Review 96 (1991), p. 48.

² R.H. Hilton and P.A. Rahtz, ‘Upton, Gloucestershire, 1959–1964’, TBGAS 85 (1966), pp. 70–146, especially pp. 119–20.

³ VCH Glouc 5, p. 145.

⁴ G.G. Astill, A Medieval Industrial Complex and its Landscape: The Metalworking Watermills and Workshops of Bordesley Abbey (CBA Research Report, 92, 1993).

⁵ J. Hunt, Lordship and Landscape. A Documentary and Archaeological Study of the Honor of Dudley c.1066–1322 (British Archaeological Reports British Series, 264, 1997), p. 81; C. Dyer, ‘A Small Landowner in the Fifteenth Century’, Midland History 1 (1972), pp. 8–9.

⁶ C. Dyer, ‘A Landscape for Pleasure: Fulbrook, Warwickshire, and John Duke of Bedford in the Fifteenth Century’, Warwickshire History 15 (2013–14), pp. 239–50, especially pp. 244–5.

⁷ D. Hinton, A Smith in Lindsey. The Anglo-Saxon Grave at Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 10, 2000), pp. 111–15.

⁸ S. Hirst and T. Dickinson, ‘The Archaeology of Bidford-on-Avon: Excavations 1970–94’, TBWAS 23 (2021), pp. 109–13, 143–50.

⁹ HTC, pp. 34–5.

¹⁰ Reg Wig, pp. 66a–66b.

¹¹ HTC, pp. 64, 80, 127–8, 129–30.

¹² RBW, pp.131.

¹³ RBW, p. 37.

¹⁴ RBW, pp. 268–9.

¹⁵ WCL, E13.

¹⁶ RBW, pp. 89, 176.

¹⁷ Cov Reg, p. 546.

¹⁸ PT, part 2, pp. 642–89.

¹⁹ PT, part 1, p. 260.

²⁰ WCL, E38.

²¹ GA, D678/98c.

²² N. Palmer and J. Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, Warwickshire: A Medieval Market Village (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph, 44, 2022), pp. 60–3, 184–7; a specialist report can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

²³ S. Ogilvie and M. Cerman, European Proto Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996).

²⁴ TNA, PROB11/11, fo. 90r; E. Carus-Wilson, ‘Evidences of Industrial Growth on Some Fifteenth-Century Manors’, EcHR, 2nd series, 12 (1959), pp. 190–205; R. Perry, ‘The Gloucestershire Woollen Industry, 1100–1690’, TBGAS, 66 (1945), pp. 49–137.

²⁵ TNA, PROB11/9 fo 142v; PROB2/57.

²⁶ M. Faraday, ed., The Bristol and Gloucestershire Lay Subsidy of 1523–1527 (GRS, 23, 2009), pp. 398–403.

²⁷ GA, D678/1/M1/1/2; WCL, E70, E75, E80.

²⁸ J.S. Lee, The Medieval Clothier (Woodbridge, 2018), pp. 121–2, 124–5; HTC, pp. 57, 61, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 81, 85.

²⁹ c. Elrington, ed., Abstract of Feet of Fines Relating to Gloucestershire 1199–1299 (GRS, 16 2003), p. 74; HTC, pp. 26, 115, 118.

³⁰ Lee, Medieval Clothier, p.125.

³¹ Lee, Medieval Clothier, pp. 272–81; N. Amor, From Wool to Cloth. The Triumph of the Suffolk Clothier (Bungay, 2016), pp. 190–6; Perry, ‘Woollen Industry’, p. 112’; VCH Glouc, vol. 11, pp. 20–30.

³² R.A. Holt, The Early History of the Town of Birmingham 1166–1600 (DS Occasional Paper, 30, 1985), p. 20.

³³ Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. 1, part 1, p. 501; vol. 1 part 2, p. 1512.

³⁴ W.H.B. Court, The Rise of Midland Industries, 1600–1838 (Oxford, 1938), pp. 36–42.

³⁵ J. Rhodes, ed., Terrier of Llanthony Priory’s Houses and Lands in Gloucester, 1443 (GRS, 30, 2016), pp. 203, 218, 253.

³⁶ Reg Guild, p. 196.

³⁷ T.H. Lloyd, Some Aspects of the Building Industry of Stratford-upon-Avon (DS Occasional Paper, 14, 1961), p. 20.

³⁸ R.C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009).

³⁹ CR Romsley, p. 41.

⁴⁰ T. Wakeman, ‘On the Kitchener’s Roll of Tewkesbury Abbey’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 15 (1859), pp. 318–32; J.M. Wilson and C. Gordon, eds., Early Compotus Rolls of the Priory of Worcester (WHS, 1908), p.19.

⁴¹ E.A. Fry, ed., Abstracts of IPMs for Gloucestershire part 3, 1302–58 (British Record Society, 40, 1910), pp. 63–72; S. Godbold and R.C. Turner, ‘Medieval Fishtraps in the Severn Estuary’, Med Arch 38 (1994), pp. 19–54.

⁴² Rec Hanley, pp. 130, 143, 146, 147, 149, 154; D. Hurst, ‘A Medieval Production Site and other Medieval Sites in the Parish of Hanley Castle: Results of Fieldwork in 1987–1992’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 3rd ser., 14 (1994), pp. 115–28.

⁴³ D. Greenblatt, ‘The Suburban Manors of Coventry 1279–1411’ (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1967), pp. 29–31.

⁴⁴ WHR, pp. 140–1; P.R. Coss, ed., The Early Records of Medieval Coventry (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 11, 1986), p. 381.

⁴⁵ Hist Glouc, vol.3, pp. 73, 149–64; RBW, pp. 7–10, 11, 13, 57–9.

⁴⁶ WCL, E223

⁴⁷ WA, ref. 705:100, BA 1120/12.

⁴⁸ J.R. Birrell, ‘Peasant Deer Poachers in the Medieval Forest’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England, edited by R. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 68–88.

⁴⁹ C. Muldrew, ‘ “The Ancient Distaff” and “Whirling Spindle”. Measuring the Contribution of Spinning to Household Earnings and the National Economy in England, 1530–1770’, EcHR 65 (2012), pp. 498–526.

⁵⁰ J. Hart, A. Mudd, E.R. McSloy, and M. Brett, Living Near the Edge: Archaeological Investigations in the Western Cotswolds (Cotswold Archaeology Monograph, 9, 2016), pp. 182–3; Hilton and Rahtz, ‘Upton’, pp. 113–16; P. Rahtz, ‘Upton Gloucestershire 1964–1968’, TBGAS 88 (1969), pp. 105, 107; Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dassett Southend, pp. 206, 209; A. Maull and others, ‘Excavations of the Deserted Medieval Village of Coton at Coton Park, Rugby’ (unpublished report by Northamptonshire Archaeology, 1998).

⁵¹ Portable Antiquities Scheme, accessible at https://finds.org.uk/database, GLO 65E15; E.R. Standley, ‘Spinning Yarns: The Archaeological Evidence for Hand Spinning and its Social Implications’, Med Arch 60 (2016), pp. 266–99.

⁵² CR Elmley, p. 148; R.K. Field, ‘Worcestershire Peasant Buildings, Household Goods and Farming Equipment in the Later Middle Ages’, Med Arch 9 (1965), pp. 138, 142.

⁵³ J.M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (New York, 1996), pp. 39–48, 51–6; WCL, C721.

⁵⁴ VCH Glouc. vol. 5, pp. 326–7, 339, 346, 347.

⁵⁵ C.E. Hart, The Regard of the Forest of Dean in 1282 (Forest of Dean Local History Society, 1987), pp. 23–43; C.E. Hart, ‘The Dean Forest Eyre of 1282’ (MA dissertation, University of Bristol, 1955); VCH Glouc, vol. 5, pp. 326–46; C.E. Hart, Royal Forest (Oxford, 1966), p. 28.

⁵⁶ VCH Glouc. vol. 5, p. 337.

⁵⁷ VCH Glouc. vol. 5, p. 345.

⁵⁸ Hart, Royal Forest, pp. 50–1.

⁵⁹ Hart, ‘Dean Forest Eyre’.

⁶⁰ Rec Feck For.

⁶¹ CR Romsley, p. 259; TNA, SC2/175/8, SC2/175/58.

⁶² BAH, 3279/346313.

⁶³ Holt, Town of Birmingham, p. 18; VCH Warw, vol. 7, pp. 253–69; A. Beardwood, ed., The Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry, 1392–1416 (DS, 17, 1939), p. 61.

⁶⁴ Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 1512, 1515.

⁶⁵ A.F.C. Baber, ed., The Court Rolls of the Manor of Bromsgrove and King’s Norton (WHS, 1963), pp. 4–10; C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? (Oxford, 2005), pp. 60–1.

⁶⁶ A. Baker, ‘A Study of North-Eastern King’s Norton: Ancient Settlement in a Woodland Manor’, TBWAS 107 (2003), pp. 131–49; G. Demidowicz and S. Price, King’s Norton. A History (Chichester, 2009), pp. 13–40, 50.

⁶⁷ E.S. Fegan, Journal of Prior William More (WHS, 1914), p. 403.

⁶⁸ J. Angus and J. Vanes, eds., The Ledger of John Smythe 1538–1550 (Bristol Record Society, 28, 1974), pp. 41–3.

⁶⁹ Smythe supplied smiths at Westbury-on-Severn and Woolaston: Angus and Vamnes, eds., John Smythe, pp. 32, 40.

⁷⁰ P. Franklin, ed., Taxpayers in Medieval Gloucestershire (Stroud, 1993); PT, part 1, pp. 260–308.

⁷¹ CR Elmley, pp. 27, 128, 161.

⁷² J. Röhrkarsten, ed., The Worcester Eyre of 1275 (WHS, new series, 22, 2008); J. Willis Bund and J. Amphlett, eds., Lay Subsidy Roll for the County of Worcester, circa 1280 (WHS, 1893); W.F. Carter, The Lay Subsidy Roll for Warwickshire of 6 Edward III (1332) (DS, 6, 1926).

⁷³ PT, part 1, p. 294.

⁷⁴ SRO, D641/1/2/270.

⁷⁵ J.T. Smith, ‘The Problems of Cruck Construction and the Evidence of Distribution Maps’, in Cruck Construction: An Introduction and Catalogue, edited by N.W. Alcock (CBA Research Report, 42, 1981), pp. 5–24; N.W. Alcock and D. Miles, The Medieval Peasant House in Midland England (Oxford, 2013); N.W. Alcock, P. Barnwell and M. Cherry eds., Cruck Buildings: a Survey (Donington, 2019); N.W. Alcock and D. Miles, ‘An Early Fifteenth-Century Warwickshire Cruck House … Joggled Halvings’, Vernacular Architecture 43 (2012), pp. 19–27.

⁷⁶ WAM, 21,377, 21,383, 21,387.

⁷⁷ CR Elmley, p.122; WA, ref. 970.5:99, BA892/1, no. 177; Anon, Excerpta e Scrinio Maneriali de Madresfield in Com Wigorn (1873), pp. 20–1.

⁷⁸ WCL, E18, E21.

⁷⁹ WCL, E33.

⁸⁰ WCL, E36, E45.

⁸¹ WCL, E45; E49.

⁸² VCH Warw. Vol. 8, p. 101.

⁸³ PT, part 2, pp. 669, 672; BAH, 518089.

⁸⁴ VCH Glouc, vol.10, p. 132.

⁸⁵ R. Holt, The Mills of Medieval England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 152–8; Carus Wilson, ‘Industrial Growth’.

⁸⁶ Willis Bund and Amphlett, Lay Subsidy circa 1280.

⁸⁷ PT, part 1, pp. 288, 299, 305.

⁸⁸ F. Piponnier and P. Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1997), pp. 63–8, pp. 86–9.

⁸⁹ Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics’, p. 48.

⁹⁰ Kings College, Cambridge, WoW 223.

⁹¹ C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 321.

⁹² WCL, E18.

⁹³ P. Thompson and S. Palmer, ‘Iron Age, Romano-British and Medieval Settlements Excavated on the Transco Newbold Pacey to Honeybourne Gas Pipeline in 2000’, TBWAS 116 (2012), p. 115.

⁹⁴ J. Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy. England 1300–1540 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 40–7.

⁹⁵ PT, part 2 p. 658; WCL, E51 (by-law at Teddington on pollution).

⁹⁶ Calendar of Ancient Deeds, vol. 5, p. 173, A11597.

⁹⁷ Gloucester Cathedral Library, Register C, pp. 130–2; Kings College, Cambridge, WOA 5; WCL, E30, E32, E52, E54, E61; Hereford Cathedral Library, R1163.

⁹⁸ TNA, SC2 210/9.

⁹⁹ TNA, SC2 175/76.

¹⁰⁰ UNMSC, MiM 128/4.

¹⁰¹ M. Aston and C.J. Bond, ‘Warwickshire Fishponds’, in Medieval Fish, Fisheries and Fishponds in England, edited by M. Aston (British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 182, 188) part 2, pp. 417–34, especially p. 431.

¹⁰² G. Templeman, ed., The Records of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine of Coventry (DS, 19, 1944), pp. 180–1.

¹⁰³ WA, ref. 705:134, Box 69B.

¹⁰⁴ TNA, SC2 175/46.

¹⁰⁵ WCL, E45a.

¹⁰⁶ WA, ref. 009:1, BA 2636/165/92221.

¹⁰⁷ Palmer and Parkhouse, Burton Dasett Southend, pp. 131–4.

¹⁰⁸ A. Sabin, ed., Some Manorial Accounts of St Augustine’s Abbey, Bristol (Bristol Record Society, 22, 1960), p. 91.

¹⁰⁹ Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters, pp. 43–59, 77–97.

¹¹⁰ PT, part 1, pp. 291–2, 294; East Raynham Library, box 43; GA, Badminton muniments, D4431/1/M1/2/1; D678/63.

¹¹¹ SRO, D641/1/2/275.

¹¹² J. Oldland, ‘The Clothiers’ Century, 1450–1550’, Rural History 29 (2018), pp. 1–22.