10

Peasant outlook, values, perceptions, and attitudes

Discovering the thought processes, mentality, and values of people who did not write is a great challenge for historians. An attempt will be made here to examine the west midland peasants’ outlook by dividing up their world into relationships with the state, their lords, and religion, and then enquiring into their perception of the environment, and sense of the individual’s role in the family and the community.

Piers Plowman

The poem that scholars have agreed to call Piers Plowman, the author of which may have been William Langland, is firmly rooted in the west midlands. ¹ The language is the dialect of the west midlands, and the work belongs to a group of alliterative poems characteristic of the region—a typical example of alliteration is the description at the beginning of the poem of the rural scene as a fair feld full of folk. A number of the manuscripts of the latest version of the poem, judging from a detailed study of their dialect, seem to have been written in south-west Worcestershire or nearby, around the southern end of the Malvern Hills (see Figure 2.7). ² A woodland landscape reminiscent of that part of Worcestershire is recalled by references in the poem to a croft, hedges, tree stumps (stocks), a moated house, and a hill called a berw (C text) or bergh (B text). ³ The author was probably born and brought up in the west-midland region, spent some time in London, and may have returned to his country of origin at least briefly. Piers Plowman went through successive revisions, now known as an A text of the 1360s, a B text written in the 1370s, and C text of the 1380s. It may have had local origins, but it was known and read in all parts of England. Piers, a peasant, is a central figure to whom the author attributes a range of attitudes and opinions. An honest and virtuous peasant speaks to us, but Piers’s views cannot be treated uncritically as the voice of the common man. However, the author is unusual in his interest in ordinary people, his idealization of some of them, and his apparent understanding of their lives. ⁴ Very few peasants could have read the poem, but they had heard about it, and were aware of its contents, judging from letters written at the time of the 1381 revolt. ⁵

The poem begins on the Malvern Hills with an imaginary person who falls asleep and has a vision of society. It refers elaborately to the very old idea of three orders. ⁶ Firstly the hard-working and productive peasants are contrasted with wasters, minstrels, and beggars. They are followed by the clergy, among them friars, priests, and bishops, who are portrayed in unflattering terms. Finally the king appears with his knights, nobles, and councillors, who are said to be potentially beneficial for the rest of society. John Gower, a contemporary of the Piers Plowman poet, made much of the three orders of workers (peasants), those who pray (the clergy), and warriors (secular aristocrats) who were committed to serve each other and receive benefits in return. However, Gower was highly critical of the failure of all three orders to play their part. ⁷ The Piers Plowman poet says that the peasants should work ‘for profit of all the people’. In particular, ploughmen were expected ‘to till and travail (work)’. This is a static and conservative model, but the poet is very aware of change, so that in his view the mutual obligations are in need of reform; for example, social ills are blamed on the corrupting power of money. In the later version of the poem, the C text, the poet, concerned by any possible association with the revolt of 1381, distances himself from radicalism. He expresses hostility to social mobility, and laments that the offspring of bondmen (serfs) can become bishops. ⁸

The peasant Piers Plowman appears towards the end of the fifth section of the poem (in the B text) as the loyal servant of Truth. Piers is presented initially as a ploughman in the sense of a servant or famulus whose job was to cultivate a lord’s demesne. Unlike some real ploughmen of the 1370s, Piers has stayed with the same employer for many years, and is a contented and motivated worker. A group of virtuous pilgrims ask him to guide them in a search for Truth, but first he must cultivate a half-acre. Some of the pilgrims offer to help in the work, and Piers asks women to sew sacks. Piers rejects the offer of help with ploughing from the knight, on the grounds that an aristocrat protects society and should not do manual work. He renews the three orders contract between peasants and aristocrats by making the knight agree to deal with the idle wasters, to hunt harmful wildlife, and not oppress his tenants, nor ill-treat his bondmen. Later Piers makes a will which takes the form of a contract between him and the church, recalling his prompt payment of tithe, and expects that the parish priest will pray for his soul. Piers speaks with authority in dealing with the knight and priest.

In the ploughing of the half-acre, Piers is represented as a self-sufficient tenant, and no longer as an employee. He owns a plough, a team of oxen, a cart, and a cow and calf, and refers to ‘my croft’, and ‘my hedges’. The half-acre is clearly only a small part of the holding that Piers works. Normally the owner of a plough and cart would have at least a half-yardland (see ‘Arable husbandry’ in Chapter 6). Piers sets some of the pilgrims to weed and dig, but the wasters refuse to work. Piers shows sympathy for the poor who deserve help, but denounces the work-shy, expressing attitudes similar to those found in fourteenth-century legislation at both manorial and national level. Hunger appears as a remedy for those who are idle, and in general food provides insights into social relations. Piers describes his own frugal diet of bread made from beans and bran, oat cakes, dairy produce, and vegetables. He complains that the wasters deserve nothing better than peas and beans. Beggars and labourers express aspiration for a better life by demanding high-quality foods such as white bread and well-cooked meat and fish.

A climax in the poem takes us to the spiritual goal pursued by Piers, an assurance of salvation of his soul. He is promised a pardon, but when he sees the document, he rejects it as inadequate and tears it in half. At this point the person whose dream has provided the substance of the poem wakes, still on the Malvern Hills.

In this complex work of religious literature, the peasant Piers was chosen as a virtuous advocate of a social order based on obligations and reciprocal benefits, untainted by the sins that abounded around him. He stood up for hard work, honesty, independence, and a zealous search for salvation, in contrast with Hawkyn, who unscrupulously sought profit in many spheres, including ignoring boundaries between open-field strips to steal a neighbour’s corn. This well-informed contemporary’s depiction of peasant ideas is the best contemporary source available to us, though we can supplement and sometimes modify the poet’s perspective from other often indirect evidence.

Peasants and the state

Piers Plowman shows respect for the king, and shares with the reformers who were most vocal in the Good Parliament of 1376 a belief that the king could be a force for good if only he was not badly or corruptly advised. A similar analysis was voiced by the rebels of 1381 who sought to remove ‘traitors’ and forge an alliance between ruler and people.

West-midland peasants were aware of the 1381 revolt, but did not participate fully. ⁹ Throughout the period under scrutiny they were drawn into the administration of the law at village level in the view of frankpledge held by the lord of the manor at which males at the age of 12 swore ‘to bear faith to the lord king of England’ to become part of a tithing which was obliged to keep the peace and report wrong-doing. The view was the main point of contact for most peasants with royal justice, but they were also liable to serve on the juries of the royal courts. Jurors who took part in the Worcestershire eyre of 1275 appear in the lay subsidy paying in tax between 8d and 10s, and mostly between 1s 6d and 6s 0d, so they were recruited from both middling and better-off peasants. ¹⁰ The rural jurors who took part in the proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in Warwickshire in 1381 were drawn from the upper end of peasant society, with a franklin from Tanworth-in-Arden, a free yardlander from Compton Verney, and the tenant of two free yardlands at Wasperton. Another juror, John Harryes, can be found at Wormleighton owning twenty pigs and twenty other animals. ¹¹ A similar conclusion has been drawn for the peasant jurors in the Gloucestershire quarter sessions in the fifteenth century; one of them was known as a yeoman, husbandman, and tailor, and was said to have overstocked the common at Minsterworth. ¹² The jury at the view of frankpledge followed routines of electing a constable (an officer under the king), dealing with small crimes such as minor assaults and thefts, and supervising the self-help police measure of the hue and cry. Occasionally they participated in the enforcement of specific royal statutes, presumably when encouraged to do so by the lord’s steward who presided over them. At Blackwell in September 1350, the year after the Ordinance of Labourers had sought to control post-plague wages, sixteen workers, half of them women, were amerced for taking as much as 5d per day, and 10d per day for a pair of harvesters. In Warwickshire, in cases brought under the Statute of Labourers of 1351 in the Justice of the Peace sessions in the 1350s and 1380s jurors provided information about workers and made judgements on them, although the offenders were sometimes their neighbours. ¹³ The peasants on the juries were acting under pressure, but among them would have been those who as employers regarded the labour laws as protecting their interests. ¹⁴ Parliamentary legislation took on the problems of vagrancy in the fifteenth century, and again a body of peasant opinion supported measures against idleness, echoing Piers Plowman’s criticism of wasters. A year after the statute of 1495 ‘against vagabonds and beggars’ the twelve jurors of Ombersley (Worcestershire) ordered the constable to identify vagabonds, beggars, and strangers, and not to permit them ‘to live here against the statute’. They were also in favour of enforcing the statute’s provisions on servants’ wages. ¹⁵ In dealing with the law of tenancy in the manor court, peasants encountered common law practices, and seemed aware indirectly of the results of Edward I’s legislation. ¹⁶

Military service carried burdens which were unlikely to have been welcomed, though they did not necessarily arouse organized opposition. Armies of foot soldiers could be raised by commissions of array, which gave a shire a quota of troops. In 1345 Edward III needed archers for his French campaigns, and fifty were to be supplied by Gloucestershire, forty by Warwickshire, and twenty from Worcestershire, reflecting the unequal populations of those counties The quotas were subdivided among the villages, so in response to a 1295 requirement by Edward I’s government for a Welsh campaign four soldiers were to be recruited in Halesowen, but the four were defrauded by a villager who offered to go in their place for a fee, and then disappeared. ¹⁷ In preparation for military service peasants were expected to possess arms, and to acquire skills with the bow at the village butts. They seemed to accept this expense and trouble, but in varying degrees of enthusiasm, depending on their perception of possible threats. The military survey in 1522 in a sample of twenty villages mainly in the north and west of Worcestershire assessed the taxable wealth of 665 people. Almost a half, 304, owned arms of some kind; forty-two, mostly gentry, had armour. The peasants (157 of them) were mainly armed with bills (long poles with a blade attached), and 105 were described as archers. ¹⁸ In Gloucestershire little commitment to military preparedness was apparent in twenty villages in the safety of the eastern Cotswolds, with twenty armed men from 305 householders, but in the west in villages such as Blaisdon and Churcham almost everyone owned weapons, presumably reflecting the nearness of the Welsh border. ¹⁹ War was usually distant, but impinged on the countryside when grain for feeding soldiers was taken compulsorily, in return for promises of compensation which was often delayed and then inadequate. A peasant became a victim of purveyance when a quarter of wheat was taken from John Jones of Compton Verney in 1347 by the sheriff of Warwickshire. ²⁰ The lords of manors fended off demands for much larger amounts with bribes to the purveyors, which peasants could not easily afford.

Peasants assisted the state, under some compulsion, in assessing and collecting direct taxes. In the lay subsidies up to 1332 local assessors had a role, and subtaxers were named in the 1327 lists. The value of movable goods was calculated for each householder, and a fraction of the value was due in tax, a twentieth in 1327, and a fifteenth in 1332. The poorer villagers were exempt. A new approach taken in 1334 persisted for the whole medieval period, with a quota of taxation assigned to each vill, often within the range of £1 10s 0d to £6. The vill was told to make its own assessments of individuals, and although the tax was called ‘the fifteenth’, vills calculated individual obligations in any way they chose. The villagers would rather not have paid the taxes, which came at irregular intervals, and sometimes in a cluster, but they seem to have accepted their duty, and perhaps were convinced that the community of the realm had given its consent in parliament on each occasion. ²¹ They did not find this extension of self-government difficult, as they were used to apportioning lump sums in their payments to the lord such as tallage, and they delivered the money on time. In contrast the poll taxes in 1379 and 1381 were widely evaded, because the tax seemed unjust, assessments were not sufficiently graduated with very few exemptions, and the local community had little part in the administration. The lay subsidy continued at the same level of assessment for decades, and vills petitioned for abatements, leading to the reduction of the burden for the whole country in 1433 and 1446, with some allowance for the changed circumstances of individual communities. ²²

Did the taxpayers in each vill believe that the lay subsidy was fair and acceptable? This was a matter for the internal government of the village, not the lord of the manor. A dispute at Quinton (Warwickshire) in 1430 reveals the lord complaining to the vill that he was expected to contribute too large a share. The disagreement revealed that the tax was based on each taxpayer contributing 4d for each large animal (cattle and horses). This would mean that a wealthy tenant with eight cattle and four horses would pay 4s, and a cottager with a cow, 4d, which seems transparent and reflected unequal wealth. ²³

Some villages lacked clarity in their assessment and seemed to favour the better-off. A rare list of taxpayers has survived for Brandon (Warwickshire) in 1497. ²⁴ It is headed ‘The sessement of the xv peny’, still preserving the memory of the ‘fifteenth’. The total was for £2 13s 3d, and it covered the two vills of Brandon and Bretford. In 1334 Brandon had paid £3 10s 0d and Bretford £2 1s 6d, making £5 11s 6d. ²⁵ The drastic reduction must mean that the authorities had been persuaded that Bretford, once a small functioning market town, had lost most of its population and taxable value. In the fourteenth century seventeen people were taxed at Bretford, but in 1497 only two Bretford taxpayers were included.

The village community of Brandon, represented no doubt by its leading figures such as Richard Collett and Thomas Bossy, decided how much their neighbours should contribute. There were thirty-five assessments, mostly named individuals, but ‘two widows’ were not named, and three pieces of land were assessed without a tenant or owner. There was no appraisal of goods, or counting of animals, but instead payments seem to have been based on impressionistic valuations of land in round shillings. The six top payers were rated at between 3s and 9s, then seventeen at 1s, 2s, or 2s 6d, and another twelve paid between 2d and 6d (Table 10.1). These included the widows, together with labourers and cottagers.

Table 10.1 Tax assessment at Brandon (Warwickshire) 1332 and 1497

Contemporaries said that the leading villagers did not pay their fair share, and it seems unlikely that a substantial leaseholder like Richard Collett was only four times wealthier than the average villager. The people at the bottom might appear to have been making a token payment, but 4d was a day’s wages, and before 1334 the least well-off were completely exempt (see Table 10.1). The leading villagers made a bargain with the state in which they were given the authority to govern their community, and efficiently delivered the agreed amount of taxes. At places like Brandon, the well-to-do paid less than was just, and the poor had to accept regressive taxation.

From around 1200 peasants were gradually being included in the political life of the kingdom. Magna Carta made concessions to ‘free men’, a category mainly confined to the aristocracy; however, all those holding land freely, including many peasants, were being brought within the jurisdiction of the royal courts. Peasants were expected to pay direct taxes in 1207, 1225, and 1232. King John in an extraordinary episode in 1209 during his conflict with the Pope insisted that all free men should swear an oath of allegiance to him. ²⁶ Peasants’ interests were affected by the agitations over Forest Law after 1217, and in the west midlands the forests of Horwell and Ombersley in Worcestershire were disafforested (after a large payment) in 1218. ²⁷ The king’s influence was felt in particular over the royal demesne manors such as Bromsgrove and King’s Norton in Worcestershire, Feckenham in the same county, and in Gloucestershire King’s Barton and the forest of Kingswood attached to Bristol Castle. Tenants on such demesne manors were not subject to the disadvantages of serfdom, and peasants on former royal demesnes (ancient demesne) valued the protection from lords’ arbitrary demands that the king might provide. Changes in the law, such as the rules relating to enclosure of common land (in 1236), royal enquiries into the judicial power of lords (from 1278) and the growing number of direct tax demands all pushed peasants into contact with politics at the highest level.

Did peasants take sides in aristocratic disputes, both in opposition to the crown, and between factions? Lists of rebels made after the collapse of the baronial reform movement of 1265 consisted mainly of knights and gentry who had fought for Simon de Montfort, but ‘the men of Bromsgrove and [King’s] Norton’ were included. ²⁸ The people of this royal manor were taking a bold position as Henry III in 1263 had granted the manor to Roger Mortimer, a royal supporter. Perhaps, as was said by the villagers of Peatling Magna (Leicestershire) also in 1265, the people of Bromsgrove believed that the barons were acting for ‘the welfare of the community of the realm’. ²⁹ Regard for Simon de Montfort was widely shared, as individuals from the region experienced miracles performed at the tomb of the baronial leader when he became a posthumous popular saint. Roger Horsman of Buckland in Gloucestershire and a woman from Dunchurch in Warwickshire were cured of paralysis after they visited the earl’s tomb. ³⁰ They and their neighbours appealed for the ‘saint’s’ help because they were convinced of his virtue.

In the early years of Edward II’s reign the earl of Warwick, Guy de Beauchamp, formed part of the magnate faction opposed to the king’s misrule under the influence of Piers Gaveston. Gaveston was seized by the barons in Oxfordshire in 1312, and taken by way of Elmley Castle (Beauchamp’s Worcestershire stronghold) to Warwick where he was executed. Adam Lese of Charlton in Cropthorne (near Elmley) appeared before the manorial court in October 1315 accused of ‘trespasses that he did in slandering and other iniquities towards the earl of Warwick and other magnates promulgated by him for the whole time past’. Lese was ordered to pay £4, a huge sum, due in three instalments over a year. He would have had problems in paying as he was assessed for the subsidy a few years later at 14d, but he was eventually pardoned by his lord, Worcester Cathedral Priory, and let off the amercement. The dispute over Gaveston’s influence divided local opinion as the then bishop of Worcester was a staunch royalist, but the Priory seems to have taken a different view judging from its treatment of Lese. A few years later some Worcestershire peasants supported Thomas of Lancaster in his rebellion against Edward II in 1321–2. ³¹

Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick between 1369 and 1401, an opponent of Richard II, may have stirred popular interest in politics in the region, and certainly his tenants and supporters, and those of his rivals, were active in local disputes. ³² More is known about the fifteenth-century peasants who became part of the affinities recruited by aristocrats (see ‘Peasants and lords’ in this chapter), but a rising in Gloucestershire in 1463–4 supported by peasants, artisans, and merchants seems to have been a popular movement, though with unknown motives. There are more indications of political activity at the end of the Wars of the Roses. In February 1485, when Richard III was establishing his rule after usurping the throne in 1483, John Lyndrych of Alcester complained that by order of Robert Charlette, a leading Cleeve Prior villager, he had ridden round Worcestershire ‘ labouring (we might say lobbying or persuading) various gentlemen and officers of the lord king’. He did this on behalf of a relation of Robert’s who had committed ‘various trespasses’ against the king. John claimed expenses of 2s 8d and 6s 8d ‘for his labour’. ³³ Evidently villagers might be drawn into the suspicion and distrust surrounding the king’s rule at local level. A year later, when Humphrey Stafford launched a rebellion against Henry VII his followers, presumably previously recruited into his affinity, included a number of Worcestershire peasants (see ‘Peasants and lords’ in this chapter).

Peasants had an important role in working for the state as jurors, soldiers, taxpayers, and tax gatherers. They were not blindly following instructions, but could take sides in the various political contests. They probably saw themselves as part of the ‘community of the realm’ to use contemporary language, and as participants in ‘political society’ in current historical terms. ³⁴

Peasants and lords

The social cohesion idealized in Piers Plowman in the late fourteenth century worked imperfectly. Lords were conscious of their deficiencies, like Bishop Wakefield of Worcester, making his will in 1395, who left £100 to be distributed among ‘my poor tenants, and especially those who were injured by me’. ³⁵ What level of consciousness did peasants have of their ill-treatment by lords: Were they simply discontented, or did they make serious criticisms of the social hierarchy?

Lords could behave in a paternalistic way, as if they were conscious of the need to win over tenants and prevent resentment or unrest. There were (rare) moments of compassion when individual poor tenants were given grain. ³⁶ Tenants performing their labour services of mowing hay were treated to a meal, as at Idlicote (Warwickshire) in 1279 when they received a wether (adult sheep), a cheese and eight white loaves, and afterwards they could take a bundle of grass for their own use. These rewards which are recorded on many manors with variations in details, could resemble a competitive sporting event as each mower lifted as much grass as possible on his scythe. ³⁷ The manorial administrators sometimes used language to soften the harshness of demands, calling the much disliked tallage ‘aid’ or a ‘gift’.

A ‘good lord’ showed flexibility in conducting manorial business. Decisions about hereditary succession to customary holdings were left to the jury in the manor court. Lords facilitated succession planning by allowing the reversion of holdings after the death or withdrawal of a sitting tenant. A widow who was found to be ‘corrupt’ by engaging in sexual relations lost her holding, but could recover the land with a fine. Subletting, though forbidden, was tolerated in practice. Lords resisted fragmentation of holdings which threatened the integrity of tenures, but when demand for land fell after 1350 a lord would offer tenants a few acres to add to their existing holdings, allowing a vacant holding to be split. A lord by these measures served the estate’s own interests in maintaining an income stream from rents, but the tenants also gained.

On their side, tenants seem to have accepted lords’ decisions which were potentially offensive to them. Evictions were quite unusual, and usually followed flagrant breaches of the customary rules. The neighbours may have approved as they could be adversely affected by an absent or neglectful tenant. Tenants collaborated with a lord, usually accepting the duty of holding office in the lord’s administration, as reeve of the manor or a juror in the court, partly because they benefited in terms of status and material gain.

Tenants could show respect for their lord with acts of deference such as new year gifts, received by William More, Prior of Worcester Cathedral Priory. The donors in 1524 and 1525 included well-heeled people such as officials of the Priory, or wealthy tenants of the bishopric estate for which More acted as surveyor. Ordinary peasant tenants of the Priory’s manors of Crowle and Grimley gave More a capon or two, and a pig was provided by Thomas Turnar of Grimley, perhaps in the hope of a favour in return. ³⁸

Manorial courts accepted in a matter-of-fact way that a tenant was receiving support from some local member of the gentry. At Sambourn (Warwickshire), where Evesham Abbey was the lord, in 1473 Joan Mulleward, widow of John Mulleward, was given licence to live off the manor and sublet her cottage ‘at the instance of Humphrey Stafford’ (lord of Grafton near Bromsgrove and steward of a number of estates). At Long Marston in 1391 John Smyth was accused of causing ‘waste and destruction’ on his yardland holding, and William Grevel, the Campden wool merchant who founded a line of landed gentry, intervened to arrange for Smyth to make a financial settlement with his lord, Winchcomb Abbey. ³⁹ Evidently peasants found it useful in dealing with their lords to cultivate influential allies.

The military survey of 1522 for Worcestershire took an interest in those who were attached to local gentry because in the event of an emergency, men with military capabilities would serve in the retinues of such important local figures as Humphrey Stafford, Gilbert Talbot, and William Compton, all knights. The largest group of retainers belonged to the affinity of Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset, some in the town of Droitwich, but also in neighbouring villages, with eight in Hanbury, seven in Feckenham, and four in Bentley Pauncefoot. ⁴⁰ Grey’s large affinity gave him a reputation for promoting disorder, but mainly around his base in Leicestershire. Clearly peasants of all kinds were prepared to attach themselves to these leading figures, providing them with support when serving on juries, or turning out with weapons. They divided their loyalties because they had also sworn to be the faithful men of the lord of their manor. An extreme example of the problems arising were the bands, better described as gangs, assembled by Nicholas Burdet to launch two raids on Shipston-on-Stour in 1413, in which two Shipston tenants were killed. Burdet’s followers included William Juggement and John Bromley of Cleeve Prior. Bromley appears in the Cleeve records as John Muleward, who held the manorial mill on lease. Juggement was a smallholder. They went hunting together, breaking their lord’s privilege of free warren. ⁴¹ Their lord was of course Worcester Cathedral Priory, and the victims of the raids at Shipston belonged to a faction among the Priory tenants which supported their lord against a group of rebels. The men who in 1486 turned out in aid of Humphrey Stafford in his rebellion against Henry VII were respectable tenants of Bromsgrove and Hanley Castle, who included a juror, a bailiff, and a forester. ⁴²

Strong loyalty to a lord by peasants was reported in the petition of widows of Painswick (Gloucestershire) in 1442, after sixteen men went to war in France with their lord, John Talbot, and eleven of them did not return. The widows asked for, and received, special consideration because of their loss, including exemption from heriot and the custom that they would lose their free bench if they remarried. ⁴³ Peasants were prepared to follow their lord into danger, and to develop relationships of service with lords who could offer patronage. These relationships could have been based on calculations of self-interest, but they could also become involved in ill-judged ventures.

Peasants seem to have adopted elements of aristocratic language so that a word such as ‘honourably’ was introduced into the court records as if it was used by jurors or other suitors. Peasants may have had regard for aristocratic symbolism, like the heraldic shield which featured on a copper alloy harness mount from Dassett Southend. ⁴⁴ A seal used by Tanworth-in-Arden peasants in 1335 and 1346 included a hunting motif, a hawk seizing a duck, recalling an aristocratic sport. Others incorporated into their design a shield. ⁴⁵ Peasant houses were divided into halls and chambers, just like the residences of the aristocracy, though only one of the many houses excavated at Burton Dassett Southend followed the full aristocratic model of a three-fold plan with hall, chamber, and rooms at the end for services ⁴⁶ (Figure 5.1). Perhaps aristocratic culture was pervasive and unavoidable, and a few peasants, with difficulty, promoted themselves into the gentry.

Peasants had good reason to distrust and resent their lords. They knew that in speech and writing they were described with words that disparaged them: villein, serf, neif, rustic, and churl were all insults. Lords seemed to relish assertions of their authority over customary tenants, like the announcements made in manorial courts at intervals that the neifs, their goods and chattels and holdings, had been seized into the lord’s hands. A rare direct encounter between lord and peasant has been recorded by an abbot of Westminster, William de Curtlington, who met Henry Melksop of Todenham (Gloucestershire) in 1321. The abbot told him of a generous (in the abbot’s view) offer to cancel a debt of accumulated payments from the customary tenants who had refused selectively to do some labour services they regarded as unjust. Melksop ‘did not deign to open his mouth to thank us’. Melksop presumably thought that the tenants had been wronged by the original demand for services, and therefore no payment was justified, and no thanks were required. The angry abbot withdrew the offer to cancel the debt. It would be hard to imagine a wider social gap than that separating a customary peasant with a holding of 27 acres and the great lord of a huge estate. ⁴⁷

In addition to claims to legal control, assertions that the property of the unfree belonged to the lord, and expectations of tenants’ gratitude, lords could seize opportunities to make impositions. Officials of Worcester Cathedral Priory in 1314 decided at Alveston (Warwickshire) that seven yardlands that had paid 6s 8d per annum should have their rents raised to 10s, and at Harvington rents of six half-yardlands once set at 10s were increased to 12s to reach their ‘true value’. At Cleeve Prior in 1378 the succession to a half-yardland was disputed. A tenant was ejected and the rightful heir installed, only to be charged a fine of 20s at a time when a fine was usually six capons. ⁴⁸ A lord could arbitrarily increase dues like Winchcomb Abbey’s officials moving from manor to manor on the estate in 1405, charging a leirwite of 20s (normally 2s), marriage fines of 20s and £4, and unusually high entry fines. These charges are just examples from many similar episodes after 1349. Although competition to acquire land had fallen, lords were still making high demands, using their social power to counteract the economic pressure to reduce rents. ⁴⁹

The tenants’ response to such assertiveness was to attempt to bargain, and to react to unrealistic demands by quietly refusing to comply. This was easier to carry out after 1349 when tenants became scarce. A tenant would agree to take a holding provided there were no labour services attached, and no payment of tallage (this was in 1362, immediately after the second outbreak of plague), or if a lord decided to increase the rent on a vacant holding, no tenant stepped forward. ⁵⁰ Lords threatened the relatives of serfs who had left the manor with financial penalties unless they secured their return, but no serfs returned and no penalties were levied.

The campaign against the common oven at Cleeve Prior shows how tenants could quietly secure a concession, but also demonstrates the tenacity of a determined lord. The common oven was like the lord’s mill, a seigneurial monopoly. The lord rented out a smallholding on which an oven was built, and its tenant undertook to bake the tenants’ loaves, knowing that the lord would enforce the ‘suit of oven’, that is to compel villagers to use the common oven. Tenants were not allowed to have ovens in their homes. The rent for the oven at Cleeve was 6s 8d in the early fourteenth century, falling later to 5s reflecting the decline in the number of households. The tenant of the oven did not need to bake well, and in 1384 the whole community brought a plea of trespass against the baker for the poor quality of the bread.

The tenants resisted by not sending their loaves, thereby reducing the oven’s income so that its tenant could not afford repairs. As the building and the service it provided deteriorated, the tenants were even more justified in baking at home. This cycle was evident in 1340–1 when the tenant failed to repair the bakehouse, and ‘served his neighbours badly’, so the villagers ‘withdrew their suit’. This recurred in the 1350s, and again after the oven was repaired in 1398, when tenants were reminded to bring their bread to be baked. In 1403, with the common oven in disrepair, Nicholas Tailor was amerced for building an oven on his holding ‘against the custom of the manor’. The problem was settled by compromise in 1412. The lord gave a licence to twenty-one tenants to build bakehouses on their holdings, and they paid sums of 2d, 3d, and 4d for the concession. This charge became an annual additional rent and was still being paid ninety years later. ⁵¹ The lord lost his monopoly, but not his revenue, as the accumulated licence fees brought in as much money as the common oven had done. The tenants gained the principle of baking their bread as they wished, and removing a humiliating restriction. They had achieved this goal by the tactic of co-ordinated non-co-operation.

The monopoly of the oven was only one example of the many impositions and restrictions to which peasants objected, and which they resisted by breaking rules, taking their corn to mills other than their lord’s, selling animals without paying tolls, felling trees on customary land without permission, and many other small-scale actions or inactions. These were not just avoiding payment, but often arose from a point of principle. If we take all aspects of the lord–tenant relationship, and identify the points of friction that were most often singled out for protest or at least non-compliance, it is possible to suggest their alternative view of lordship. They did not express the radical rejection of lordship like rebels in south-eastern England in 1381. They could however envisage a world in which lords received cash rents from their tenants, without all the extra dues associated with servility. Free tenants paid a rent and a relief (a year’s rent) on taking on a holding, and all tenants aspired to that simple and honourable position. The customary tenants’ hostility towards particular obligations can be identified from thirteenth-century agreements made by individuals to buy exemption from labour services, and after 1350 the dues that they chose not to pay if they were negotiating to take a holding, or the payments that were refused collectively, or those that were concealed. These included recognitions (paid collectively to a new lord), tallage, marriage fines, tolls on the sale of animals, labour services, chevage (head money for being absent from the manor), suit of mill, woodpenny, and others. They could still campaign for the reduction in the cash ‘rent of assize’, leading to such sharp confrontations as the bargaining at Lighthorne (Warwickshire) in which the tenants threatened in 1437 to leave the village, compelling the lord to reduce the rent of each yardland from 15s 6d per annum to 10s 6d. Tenants at Cheltenham refused to pay some rents and it needed an arbitration between 1445 and 1452 to bring the rent total down from just over £10 to £6 13s 4d. ⁵²

Entry fines could be high, over £10 per yardland before 1350, but fines do not seem to have been refused by tenants, nor were demands made for their removal. The market forces that usually decided the level of fines was apparently accepted as a fact of life. Heriots were more controversial, although they were supposed to be paid by free tenants and therefore not usually regarded as a mark of servile status. They represented a considerable burden, as tenants with multiple holdings would owe a ‘best beast’ for each holding resulting in two or three oxen or other valuable animals worth as much as 30s being taken by the lord. Tenants would arrange with the lord to pay a fixed sum in cash instead of an animal, and another route to avoid the full impact was for an incoming tenant to pay an entry fine which supposedly included a sum for the heriot. Families at Ombersley resorted to subterfuge, as after 1464 a growing number of tenants were claimed to have nothing more valuable than a sheep as their ‘best beast’. The deception was exposed in 1478 by Thomas Jones, who had been an unsuccessful claimant for a half-yardland holding, and offered to pay the lord 5s to compensate him for the inadequate pair of sheep worth 20d paid by the family of his predecessor, Richard Jones. ⁵³ The lord, Evesham Abbey, responded weakly to this revelation of fraudulent practices, and continued to accept sheep from holdings likely to have possessed oxen and valuable horses.

Some places developed a tradition of resistance and rebellion, notably Halesowen and Thornbury (see ‘Serfdom, 1200–1540’ in Chapter 3). The tenants of the manor of Blackwell, which included two villages, Blackwell and Old Shipston, and the small town of New Shipston, resisted and protested repeatedly. The chapel at Shipston served as a symbol of self-government and independence before 1300. Campaigns of non-co-operation on such matters as marriage fines and suit of mill were active from the early fourteenth century onwards. The antagonisms were notable for acts and threats of violence against manorial officials. Strong language was used, with expressions of contempt for the lord in 1342, and in 1378 a demand that they should explain to the lord in person their refusal to do weeding services was described by a tenant as ‘foolishness’. The townspeople’s discontent encouraged their rural neighbours. The townsmen claimed that Shipston had been a royal estate, and this mistaken belief, with its implications of ‘ancient demesne’ privileges may have raised the peasants’ hopes. ⁵⁴ These prominent examples of conflict were not exceptional aberrations, as dozens of villages won small victories in their tussles with their lords.

Blackwell and Shipston were not threatened by enclosure around 1500, as was the case in dozens of champion villages, but while some seem to have been undermined and overwhelmed by pressure from their lords, organized resistance was attempted at Shuckburgh (Warwickshire) and with success at Longborough (Gloucestershire). ⁵⁵ Truculent refusals to pay modest rents or perform a few labour services were much more common than strong opposition to enclosure and usurpation of common pasture which threatened the very existence of the village.

To conclude, deferential peasants and paternalistic lords formed part of the story of west-midland rural society in our period. However, if they were to maintain their flow of income lords had to maintain pressure on their tenants. Peasants established limits to co-operation, and pursued selective campaigns against impositions such as suit of oven. Their goal was that free and customary tenants alike would owe an annual cash rent (preferably a low one) with perhaps a payment at the beginning of a tenancy; in short, peasants looked forward to the day when all tenants would be freeholders.

Peasants and religion

The church in the early Middle Ages was hierarchical, ruled from the top, promoted by kings, and developed a rural network of churches under aristocratic patronage. In the later Middle Ages, parish churches were propertied institutions with rights to collect tithe, and had often begun as profitable assets of landed estates. Peasants were expected to learn from the church’s teaching, observe its moral codes, attend its services, and fund its clergy through tithes and rent. Given these entrenched institutions and their powerful grip on society, how could peasants have any influence on religious life?

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, parishioners, who originally had a very limited role, were increasingly active in the management of religious life. They could take initiatives, for example, founding chapels to fill gaps when small villages and hamlets lacked their own places of worship. In eastern England, chapels were sometimes endowed with collective grants of land by peasant communities. The same may have happened in our region at Oldbury, on the Halesowen estate, where the chapel was built on customary land which was presumably once part of a peasant holding. ⁵⁶ Most of the dozens of chapels in our region are very poorly documented, or are known only from archaeological evidence, which suggests that they were founded informally, without written grants of land. The chapel of Shipston-on-Stour in the parish of Tredington, was apparently in existence by the twelfth century, serving the village before the foundation of the town. The rector of Tredington resented the loss as part of his parish slipped out of his control, and the lord of the manor feared that the chapel enabled his tenants to assert some independence, especially as the chaplain was appointed and paid by the community. ⁵⁷ A common ambition among those attending chapels was to gain rights of burial, but the rectors opposed the idea as mortuary payments accompanied each funeral. The burials that are sometimes found in excavations at chapels show that congregations might flout the rules. ⁵⁸

In the later Middle Ages the church expected that the lay parishioners would be responsible for the upkeep of the church building and its goods (furnishings, ornaments, and vestments), and for the churchyard. The chancel would be built and maintained by the rector, leaving the rest of the building, that is nave, aisles, porch, tower, and steeple to the laity. Churchwardens were responsible for gathering funds and spending them on the parish’s needs, for which they would be answerable to the parishioners, sometimes preparing written financial accounts. ⁵⁹ Lay parishioners also participated in church courts, where they provided information about the sins of their neighbours, and commented on the state of the church building and the conduct of the clergy (see ‘Character of family life’ in Chapter 5).

The clergy could represent the aristocratic domination of the church because the sons of landed gentry were sometimes presented to a benefice on their family’s estate. A rural rectory could resemble a secular manor, with a glebe that functioned as a demesne, and peasant tenants who owed rents and services. The rectory could be built in the style of a manor house, and the household staffed with servants like that of a manorial lord.

However, the social distance between peasants and clergy was not always so great. Many glebes were no larger than a peasant holding, and the parish clergy followed the same farming routines as their peasant neighbours. Often rich rectors were absentees, and the clergyman who served the parish was a stipendiary priest of modest status. A growing number of rich rectories were taken over by monasteries, who appointed vicars inferior to rectors in status and income. In larger parishes a team of clergy were carrying out a variety of duties, including priests serving chantries for annual stipends not much larger than the wages of a skilled artisan. By the fourteenth century a growing number of the ordained clergy were of peasant origin, even the sons of serfs, who had attended local schools (see ‘Social mobility’ in Chapter 4). The combination of these low-born clergy and the management of parish life by the community leads to the conclusion that local churches were no longer under complete aristocratic domination.

The region’s most informative churchwardens’ accounts come from Halesowen, beginning in 1487. ⁶⁰ Halesowen’s large and impressive church building stood near the centre of an extensive parish with a population in the region of 1,500 (Figure 10.1). The small borough occupied streets around the church, but most of the parishioners lived in a dozen hamlets and villages. The widely spread settlements developed their own sense of belonging, and three of them, Frankley, Oldbury, and Romsley, had their own chapels. Frankley’s chapel even had its own churchwardens. The outlying chapels acknowledged their connection to Halesowen by paying for lights in the parish church. The Halesowen churchwardens, who each served for a year or two, represented a cross-section of rural society, including the richest villager John Mucklowe, who paid 7s to the lay subsidy of 1524 (his goods had been valued at £14), but the majority of wardens were of more modest means and contributed between 1s and 3s 6d. Henry Melley, who paid 1s tax on his lands, had inherited two half-yardlands held in villeinage in 1520, and a free holding of unknown size, so he was well-provided. One churchwarden was assessed in the lay subsidy on wages and paid 4d.⁶¹ For comparison a half of the twenty-one churchwardens who appear in the fifteenth-century Hartlebury church court records held two yardlands or above (not a very large holding in this village, but still quite substantial), so there was a bias towards the better-off, but five had half-yardlands or cottages. ⁶²

Figure 10.1. Halesowen parish. The parish coincided with the manor, but Frankley, a chapelry, had a different lord. The church was sited in the borough at a little distance from the Abbey. The boundaries were formed by 1300; defining them simply posed difficulties in the north (source: Z Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), p. xiv).

The agricultural and the liturgical year followed different but overlapping calendars. The universal church began the year on 25 March, known as Lady Day in England, but villagers and the lords of manors preferred 29 September (Michaelmas) because it marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter ploughing. The Halesowen churchwardens’ accounting year followed agricultural practice by choosing 29 September after 1507, and also in 1487–8. In the intervening years, the churchwardens began their term of office on either 11 November (Martinmas) or 25 November (St Catherine). Martinmas had agricultural significance as the end of the pastoral farming year, and the traditional date for killing animals. St Catherine’s day was a special event in Halesowen: a chapel in the north aisle of the parish church was dedicated to her, with an altar on which a light was kept burning, and on her day bells were rung and a priest sang mass. For the rest of the year, both parish and village celebrated the usual feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, and these were the occasions for church ales in the years that they were held. Special days at Halesowen were St Stephen’s day (26 December) and Relics’ Sunday in early July. The churchwardens kept banners in good repair for use on processions, among them the collective progress through the fields and along the parish boundary on the Rogation days (in the week before Ascension Day, so usually in May) which were important events in an agricultural community because in practical terms they renewed memories of boundaries, and they were also the occasion for the ritual of blessing the crops. At Hanbury (Worcestershire) in c.1530 the rogation procession helped a witness in a church court to remember tithe obligations, and at Shuckburgh (Warwickshire) around 1500 the procession was prevented from gaining access to common land by an enclosing lord. ⁶³

In most parishes about forty feast days would be commemorated through the year, and these days set aside for religious devotion created dilemmas for peasants who were expected to desist from work. The Hartlebury church court heard of individuals who had worked on seven named saints’ days, four of them in the harvest season, and clearly a peasant would be tempted to work on a holiday to bring in crops. The Halesowen churchwardens’ sources of income reflected the agrarian way of life, as they hired out cows, let parcels of land that they had been given for rent, and charged for grazing road-side pasture. Their counterparts at Hartlebury rented out beehives. At Halesowen the regular annual revenues, together with bequests, and fees for burial inside the church, provided enough income (£2 or £3 per annum) to cover the routine expenses of wax, oil, and minor repairs. If the churchwardens embarked on larger building projects, such as a rood loft or extensive roof repairs they held a church ale, which would yield between £2 and £4. Ales were rooted in village tradition and could be held for a number of purposes, including fundraising for charity. At Halesowen’s event food was provided as well as drink, and the wardens were spared paying for a church house and its upkeep as the ales seem to have been held in the houses of the wealthier wardens such as John Mucklowe. The ales celebrated the unity of the community in both religious and secular matters. ⁶⁴

Each parish raised funds in different ways. At Badsey (Worcestershire) ales were held but they were not very profitable, yielding 1s 11d in one year and 2s 3d in another. ⁶⁵ Instead, the wardens were funded by groups resembling informal fraternities, who must have held celebrations, in which ale no doubt featured, and collected money. The young men formed one group, the young women (maids) another, and the ‘little maids’ a third. ‘Cock money’ was raised at an event on Shrove Tuesday when sticks were thrown at a tethered cock. Hartlebury funded parish expenditure in a more sober and systematic fashion, by collecting money through an assessment of wealth, so that a tenant with a yardland was expected to contribute 3s 4d to a new bell tower. ⁶⁶ In the long run such methods of collecting funds developed in most parishes into a rating system, but in the early sixteenth century church ales were still important events in many parishes, and to hold them church houses were being built throughout the region. ⁶⁷

The churchwardens gathered money to provide the material basis for a satisfying liturgical and spiritual experience. The laity assembled in the nave of the church witnessed on the other side of the screen the clergy performing elaborate rituals using the books, vestments, vessels, incense, and other items provided by the wardens. The congregation would be impressed visually by the colours and designs of textiles, glass, wall paintings, glazed floor tiles, and statues, and also by the sounds of the bells, organ, and singing. The smell of incense completed the impact of the service on the senses. The parishioners in the Hartlebury court thought it important that images and rituals should be visible, and they asked that the parish clerk at Easter should at the appropriate time draw back the cloth hanging in the church at Easter so that the congregation could see the altar. ⁶⁸

The parishioners, as represented by the churchwardens expected impressive displays which needed regular renewals in structures and furnishings. At Halesowen, for example, every few years some improvement was made, like the new rood loft that was installed in 1530–2 at great expense. Church buildings themselves reflect this desire for additions which often had a liturgical purpose, so aisles accommodated extra altars and side chapels for chantries, porches provided spaces for weddings, and towers with bells contributed to funeral rituals. No doubt these matters were discussed by the laity and the clergy, but the wardens held the purse strings and must have made the final decisions. In some parishes the local aristocrats were major players, and throughout the region churches survive such as Sudeley (Gloucestershire) and Weston-on-Avon (Warwickshire) where wealthy patrons funded much of rebuilding (the lord bequeathed £50 in 1480 in the case of Weston) and dictated the architecture, insisting that the tombs of the family would be prominent features. ⁶⁹ In many cases, although local gentry might have made a large contribution to building work, the funding was a collective effort and the wardens had some say in the cost, scale, and style of the building. Some parish churches were rebuilt without any visible input from lords, and it is known that in addition to the community’s fund raising, local peasant families paid for particular features, such as windows. ⁷⁰ Judging from the quantity of rebuilding, especially in the century before the Reformation, and the quality of the buildings, the parishioners were strongly motivated. They were enthusiasts for providing appropriate spaces for the celebration of the mass and other ceremonies, but they were also expressing their pride in their communities and seeking to impress parishioners, travellers, and visitors.

The work on the fabric had a significance for our understanding of the religion of the peasant parishioners. The churchwardens at Halesowen chose in 1512–13 to employ a painter (from Birmingham) to depict a Doom. This has been covered or removed subsequently, but such paintings in other churches occupy the space above the chancel arch, visible to everyone in the nave. At the top of the painting, Christ presided over the last judgement, with the souls of the righteous on his right hand enjoying the splendours of the celestial city, and the sinners to the left suffering the torments of hell. ⁷¹ This was reinforcing the message of sermons and was designed to persuade sinners to reform, threatening punishment but also giving hope of salvation. A social message was being conveyed that moral distinctions were more important than social rank on the day of judgement, as the wealthy and powerful (bishops for example) were depicted among the damned. Sermons of the late fourteenth century gave egalitarian ideas a sharp edge by assuring the poor that they would sit beside God and join in the judging of the rich. ⁷² Church courts, with strong lay participation, dealt more immediately with those accused of sins and sought to correct their behaviour. Although the courts were mainly concerned with points of law, it could still be said in 1496 at Hartlebury that church attendance was ‘for the salvation of souls’. The court took seriously the notion that parents should educate their children in religious matters, hearing that Thomas Holmer of Hartlebury was accused of preventing his sons from attending church, and that he failed to instruct them in the catholic faith. None of our sources had occasion to mention the laity’s participation in the mass, perhaps because it was so widely accepted as a central moment in which the congregation came together. They were supposed to share in a sense of connection with the whole community of the faithful, and with the divine order. ⁷³ The written sources say little about individual acts of piety, though there were occasional references to pilgrimage, like the Hartlebury parishioner who went to Rome. Visits to shrines explain the metal badges and ampullae used to contain holy water from places of pilgrimage which are found in fields where they were lost, or more likely mislaid in the home and incorporated in the household refuse. ⁷⁴ Badges from the Marian cult centre at Walsingham in Norfolk have been found at Highnam, Maiseyhampton, and Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, so the faithful were prepared to travel considerable distances. ⁷⁵ ‘Beads’, presumably rosary beads, are sometimes mentioned in court records as goods lost or stolen, and individual beads are found on excavated rural settlements.

The sources are also deficient in recording indifference, scepticism, and dissent. Thomas Holmer of Hartlebury evidently lacked enthusiasm for the church’s religious teaching and contemporaries clearly suspected that a failure to observe Sundays and saints’ days might point to unbelief. Much of the heresy in the region was based in towns, though the occasional offender was identified in the country, like John Walcote, who was discovered at Hazleton in Gloucestershire in 1425, but when put on trial in Worcester agreed to abandon his heretical beliefs and performed an elaborate public penance. His was apparently an isolated case, though other named individuals were reported in the region at about the same time, and we might wonder how and where they came into contact with heresy. ⁷⁶

Peasants experienced a religion that was full of colourful ceremony, which gave them an alternative to the ordinariness of their daily routines. Their willingness to participate in parish life with its raising of substantial funds and ambitious projects suggests not just an acceptance of conventional worship, but also that they subscribed to the teaching of the church on morality and salvation that underpinned the whole edifice of organized religion. The universal preoccupation of the age, shared by peasants and reflected in Piers Plowman, was the question ‘How can I save my soul?’ Clergy composing sermons, such as John Mirk, based at Lilleshall in Shropshire, 20 miles from Halesowen, could defend the validity of popular religious devotion. He demonstrated this with a story of a husbandman teaching monks about the intensity of his spiritual experience gained from a vision of the punishment of sinners in hell. ⁷⁷

Peasants and the environment

Country people showed their awareness of landscape by their incorporation of terms such as ‘filden’ or ‘feldon’, ‘Arden’, and ‘wold’ into minor place names and personal names. ⁷⁸ Patterns of short distance migration (see ‘Migration’ in Chapter 4) indicate a preference to stay within familiar landscapes, suggesting a sense of identity.

While people might have been attached to local landscapes, did they also have an understanding of the problems posed by the imbalances of the environment and the harm that might arise from excessive exploitation of resources? Was their main aim the short-term pursuit of a living, or did they farm the land with the intention of conserving fertility and preventing degredation? ⁷⁹ Open-field farmers in particular have been criticised for their conservatism, but perhaps they persisted in their two-course rotations and stinted pastures because they correctly feared that innovation would have adverse consequences.

Peasants are said to have ignored provident restraints as they gave priority to the welfare of themselves and their households. A criticism of medieval agriculture in general was the tendency in the thirteenth century to extend cultivation over infertile land or to plough beyond the realistic limits. They assarted the sandy soils of Wolverley (Worcestershire) for example, or founded new settlements on land now rated as unsuitable for arable farming. Landscape indications of this extension of ploughing (though not always securely dated) include the cultivation terraces on steep hillsides (strip lynchets), such as those near Wotton-under-Edge, or in the lowlands the ridge and furrow encroaching on meadows which were liable to flooding. Having sensibly adopted a two-course rotation, probably in the pre-Conquest period, they risked a loss of fertility by planting on the fallow and reducing the amount of pasture. Over the period between 1350 and 1520 they converted some arable to grazing, but a threat came from overburdening common pastures with ever-larger flocks and herds, leading to the gloomy prediction of ‘a tragedy of the commons’ (see ‘Changing agriculture: managing the fields’ in Chapter 6). The management of woods will help to clarify the dilemmas that they faced, and their behaviour in the face of ecological threats.

Peasants could be regarded as the enemies of woods and their tendency to remove trees and vegetation was an obstacle to sustainability. Lords protected manorial woodland from encroachment and over-exploitation. Royal forests practised conservation on a large scale, as courts dealt with long lists of those who felled trees and assarted woodland in the period of expansion in the thirteenth century. The king expected to profit both from timber, wood, and industrial activities, and to generate revenue from enforcing Forest Law. Parks were designed both to protect deer, and to maintain useful woods. Both inside and outside parks lord managed wood pastures to grow larger trees and graze animals, and by fencing coppices to promote the growth of underwood (often hazel and thorns). Underwood and larger trees could be combined if the woods were managed as ‘coppice with standards’. Underwood was cut on cycles of five to eight years, and larger trees were felled occasionally. The larger trees were kept as a store of wealth to be realized when cash was short. Trees could be cropped, having their branches lopped or pollarded for use without felling, and bark from these operations sold to tanners. Applying forestry management to the woods enabled them to be maintained and renewed. Commercial exploitation of woods, for example for industry, was allowed under licence, and supposedly supervised by the lords’ officials. ⁸⁰

Peasants appear in the lords’ records as disrupting the orderly management of woods. They had access to woods, having the right to pasture animals among the trees, and under the customary rules of housbote, heybote, and firebote they could take a limited number of trees or a quantity of underwood for building, fencing, and fuel. They were supposed to exercise these rights under supervision, but instead entered the woods as they wished and helped themselves to more than they were entitled. Exasperated woodwards, as well as recommending financial penalties, confiscated axes that were being used illegally. Peasants also grazed animals to excess, and introduced the most destructive livestock, pigs and goats. Owners of pigs took more than their share by collecting fallen acorns and carrying them away. The underwood was endangered by breaking the fences and allowing livestock to browse the growing shoots. Coppice growth was cut illicitly to supply charcoal burning, ashburning, and hurdle making. ⁸¹ Many of these offences reduced the value of woods without destroying them. Unauthorized assarting however devastated areas of woodland by permanent removal of vegetation.

Woods were not the only sources of trees and useful vegetation. Hedges could be sources of fuel, especially in the woodland districts with their numerous crofts and closes. Even in champion country the parish boundary could be marked by a stout hedge, and the common fields were surrounded by discontinuous hedges supplemented by fences. The village itself had many hedges enclosing house plots, and additional crofts. Especially attractive for those gathering firewood were the dense growths of bushes and trees which were landmarks in the local landscape, like the ‘Hedge’ at Sambourn (Warwickshire) which became a minor place-name. ⁸² Periodically trees in hedges were felled without licence, and the timber sold. On open land, especially on the common pasture, thickets of bushes grew, typically hawthorns, blackthorns, gorse, and broom, and they were in demand for fuel and fencing. The lord’s court, concerned by the over-exploitation of this resource, attempted to limit the cutting of the thorns to those with common rights, and forbade their collection for sale. A similar problem was posed by the cutting of shoots of willow trees which again were taken by outsiders in excess.

The picture that comes from a simple reading of the court records of lords defending woods from misuse by peasants is of course a misleading oversimplification. The protection of woods, trees, and bushes by the authorities did not aim to prevent the taking of timber and underwood, but rather to collect revenue. The financial penalties could be seen as licence fees, showing that lords (and the officials in charge of the royal forests) accepted the loss of some of the assets as long as money was paid. They were also themselves capable of removing woods to make way for profitable agriculture, to ‘approve’ it in their language (meaning improve). Peasants tended to enclose and cultivate an acre or two at a time, whereas lords were capable of clearance on a much larger scale, such as the 200 acres in Dean by the Abbot of Tintern in 1282, or the 23 acres which William de Botreaux, lord of Alcester assarted at King’s Coughton (Warwickshire) before 1280. ⁸³

Peasants appreciated the long-term utility of woods. Like everyone they relied on timber for building material and underwood for fuel and fencing. They were especially dependent on the implements and utensils made in or near woods using the available raw materials, and many of the craftsmen were peasants pursuing dual occupations as ploughwrights, cartwrights, turners, and coopers. The majority of the animals grazing in wood pastures, and most of the pigs being fattened on acorns belonged to peasants. They had a strong vested interest in the survival of woods.

Manorial woods, which were defended by the lord’s officials, especially the woodwards, figure prominently in the documents. The most comprehensive record, in Domesday Book, omitted woods that brought no revenue to lords. This continued, so that thirteenth-century surveys and extents only include demesne woods, and sometimes give the impression that a manor was provided with either a few acres of wood or no wood at all. Champion and wold landscapes which have sometimes been described as ‘treeless’ were dotted with ‘groves’ usually with one for each township. An example is Aston Blank (Gloucestershire) (see Figure 2.4) which had a single grove of 30 acres in the middle of its field system in 1752. Most groves contained enough wood for the village’s fuel and fencing, though timber would have to be brought in from large remote woods. Common woods, managed by the villagers, could be large and can be discovered by careful historical detective work. Some notable examples have been identified in the large Arden townships of north Warwickshire, at Temple Balsall (where Balsall Wood contained 350 acres in 1538), Lapworth (with Kingswood, where people from Wellesbourne had common rights), Knowle Wood (called Chessett Wood in the Middle Ages), Solihull Wood (containing 400 acres) and Yardley Wood just over the boundary in Worcestershire. In Meriden parish were two large common woods, one called Meriden Shelfs and a wood in Alspath township. Berkswell’s common wood, Beechwood, was not so extensive (Figure 10.2). These woods often no longer exist, having been removed in modern times, like Balsall Wood which became Balsall Common, and is now covered with the houses of an outer suburb of Coventry. The loss of common woods was not the inevitable consequence of peasant mismanagement, as many of them, like Balsall Wood, survived into the sixteenth century. ⁸⁴ The smaller groves of the champion and wolds were similarly kept unscathed and often still exist, as in the case of Aston Blank.

Figure 10.2 Woods in Balsall and Berkswell, Warwickshire. The two Arden parishes had plentiful woodlands, including common woods, and a number of groves (source: Wager, Woods, Wolds and Groves, pp. 86–9).

Peasants defended woods in which they had common rights from appropriation and encroachment by direct action and legal process. In the Forest of Dean the abbot of Flaxley complained that Richard of Blaisdon, who was not acting alone, destroyed the bank around the wood at Timbridge in 1231. ⁸⁵ The obstacle had been raised by the abbot to exclude local people, and he apparently succeeded. In Arden Geoffrey de Langley faced ‘a serious contention’ involving two free tenants, Richard and William de Pinley in the 1230s. Langley planned to ‘improve’ the wood and other land at Pinley; his opponents took legal action that forced a negotiation and settlement in which the de Pinleys were bought off with a grant of land (a half-acre each) and other concessions. ⁸⁶

Collective action was taken by Warwickshire tenants who complained that by enclosing or assarting woods lords were depriving them of right of pasture and customary access to woods for house repairs and fencing. The men of Stoneleigh in 1290 petitioned the king because Stoneleigh Abbey by assarting was threatening their right of estovers (housbote, heybote, and firebote) in the lord’s woods, together with their customary pasture for livestock and pigs in particular, and the gathering of nuts. They claimed that their rights were vital to them, and that they would be impoverished by their loss. A similar dispute at Middleton in 1269 led to the lord Philip Marmion taking to court fifty-one people who entered his wood and cut and carried off trees. These apparent acts of theft were really cases of exercising disputed common rights. We do not know the perspective of the offenders because they did not attend the court, perhaps after being discouraged from doing so. ⁸⁷

As well as large woods that served whole communities, small groves were held by peasants as part of their portfolios of landholdings, again using Warwickshire examples. Richard Colyns of Tanworth-in-Arden in 1351 was holding three fields (campos), a meadow, and two groves for 21d. The phrase ‘plots of wood’ was sometimes used at Tanworth. Groves appear elsewhere in the Arden, with twenty-nine in 1553 at Berkswell, and in 1327–8 eight tenants held groves at Wroxall ⁸⁸ (Figure 10.2). Sambourn tenants around 1500 held ‘coppices’ rather than groves. As with other parts of their holdings, they were supervised, and were presented in the court for felling trees without licence or failing to keep fences in repair. At this village these small private woods survived and appear on a map of 1746. ⁸⁹ The hedges which were subject to attack by those gathering firewood often belonged to peasants, and they joined in the efforts to defend them. Similarly the protests against large-scale removal of thorns, furze, and broom on commons came from the village community represented by the manor court.

To sum up, lords and peasants over-exploited woods and removed great quantities of natural vegetation by clearing land for agriculture. Peasants also can be found protesting against enclosure and clearance when it threatened their interests. Many woods survived the threats of the Middle Ages, only to be felled and converted into agricultural land in the disafforestations of the seventeenth century, notably in Feckenham Forest. The destruction of woodland continued in subsequent centuries.

The conclusion must be that although peasants abused their customary rights and damaged woods on occasion, a strong body of opinion within the village favoured preserving woods and making use of their resources on a scale that prevented their destruction. When manor courts heard of attacks on woods, hedges, and thorn thickets beyond the customary limits the jurors and other court officials named the offenders in the court, and joined in deciding their amercements.

In the case of woodland management, as in more general issues of maintaining equilibrium between cultivation and pasture, or between individual profit and the common good, much depended on checks and balances within village society. For every move to exploit resources irresponsibly and selfishly, there were counteracting tendencies among those favouring restraint and neighbourly co-operation. Wise policies on calculating stints like those advocated at Long Marston in 1453 (see ‘Animal welfare’ in Chapter 7), were presumably widely shared, if not often expressed so explicitly. Peasants may not have advocated sustainability in the modern sense, but the village community promoted compromise between different interest groups which helped to prevent the disastrous degradation of the environment.

Individuals and communities

The poem Piers Plowman deals rather obliquely with issues of community and family. A discordant band who might be seen as representing the lower end of village society began to help Piers in his work but failed. Piers has a family but is presented as a self-reliant individual who advocates social collaboration without much prospect of achieving it. As an alternative to Piers’s upright morality, Hawkyn the ‘active man’ appears initially as a dishonest trader, but also boasts of the typically peasant offence, in an open-field setting, of ploughing over the boundary of his strip of ploughland, encroaching on his neighbour, and in the harvest reaching over with his sickle to cut corn from the crops growing on the next strip.

To what extent did peasants consider the welfare of others in their decision making? This section is focussed on the culture of community, the treatment of the older generation within families, and the morality of trade.

The collective life of the village is seen in a fresh perspective from the financial accounts of John Wickwane, abbot of Evesham, and William More, prior of Worcester, compiled in 1456–7 and 1518–36. ⁹⁰ These wealthy ecclesiastics lived in an aristocratic style, in large houses full of servants, administrators, and guests, eating and drinking well and welcoming a varied range of professional entertainers, including minstrels, jugglers, and musicians. The abbot and prior and their companions found time for villagers to present dramatic performances. Towns such as Evesham and Pershore were represented by their players, but our focus is on the villagers. Some were connected to church events, like the church ale at Grimley, ‘and a play’, for which Prior More gave a reward of 7s 6d. He was both rewarding the players, and supporting church funds. Across the country, we know of churchwardens enhancing the experience of the church ale with drama. Grimley belonged to the Priory estate, but villages without that connection were welcomed at the Prior’s residence, such as the Martley players as part of the celebration of the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 8 September 1519. ⁹¹ The abbot of Evesham gave 3s 4d to the tenants of Broadwell for playing before their lord, and the same sum for a group from Upper Swell at Christmas. Both were on the Evesham estate, but Northfield was not, and its players received only 12d.

The content of the plays is not usually recorded. Those that were held on church festivals elsewhere had a religious content, like the ‘Christmas game’ at Ashburton in Devon which featured God, Christ, Herod, and devils. A very elaborate play at Bassingbourn (Cambridgeshire) told the life of St George, complete with a dragon. ⁹² Others were entirely secular: among plays performed before Prior More were ‘Robin Hood, Maid Marion and others’ performed by tenants of Cleeve Prior in July 1531 (for 6s 8d), ‘Robin Hood and Little John’ by an Ombersley group in May 1535, and ‘Robin Hood and his men’ was put on for an event connected with Tewkesbury Bridge, though no village was mentioned. The prior gave 12d to the Robin Hood box at Claines in 1530. In addition to plays More saw performances by ‘dancers of Claines’ at Midsummer, and he heard ‘men and women singing on May morning’ at Grimley, for which he gave 3s. ⁹³

These performances could be dismissed as clumsy rustic affairs, which would be received with disdain by the elite audience, or at best were attended as a duty with paternalistic tolerance. The obvious parallel is the rude mechanicals’ play in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, written only sixty years after Prior More’s last years. Perhaps we should have higher expectations. Grimley’s repertoire suggests a village with a tradition of music and drama, and the more distant places like Martley and Northfield had apparently acquired reputations that travelled far. If the audience had found the plays tedious, they would surely have discouraged the performers, but instead they received them and gave them substantial rewards.

Mounting a play suitable for presentation outside the village shows leadership and organization, and a commitment of time. A high level of participation is suggested by Cleeve Prior’s play which required a sizeable cast if Robin Hood was accompanied by an appropriate band of outlaws: at this time Cleeve had about twenty households. At Coventry the obligation to perform in the city’s drama cycle caused much debate among the participating fraternities, with understandable reluctance to commit to the task, but also some pride in the achievement. Perhaps the Worcestershire villagers experienced a similar combination of problems and rewards. Another implication is that literacy had become sufficiently widespread for the players to acquire a script, and that at least some of them had the ability to read it. A play book was used for the St George play at Bassingbourn, and the text of a Robin Hood play survives. ⁹⁴ The brief references to the plays are enough to suggest that village communities could achieve a level of complexity, sophistication, and organization.

Villagers were also challenged by the difficult cultural decisions that they had to take in modifying and building parish churches. Much church architecture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was commissioned by churchwardens and the parishioners they served. Peasants found themselves negotiating with masons, carpenters, glaziers, painters, and carvers about the form of the whole building, or an aisle or tower, or about details of tracery, size of windows, images, the scenes and figures to be included in glass windows and wall paintings, and the design and decoration of screens and rood lofts. If aristocratic patrons and rich donors contributed funds, their preferences would have carried great weight. The views of the clergy would have to be taken into account; the advice of the craftsmen must have been crucial, and note would be made of the work that had been done on neighbouring churches; but the final decision lay with the leading parishioners and particularly the churchwardens. We are presented with evidence for the end product and must presume the long processes of thought and debate that lay behind the eventual result.

Concern for the welfare of the older generation is a useful test of the extent to which society was dominated by self-interested individualism or a willingness to make sacrifices for others. This was a dilemma for family members faced with elderly relatives unable to support themselves, and for the wider community.

Maintenance agreements recorded the surrender of a holding by a tenant wishing to retire from fully active farming, in exchange for a promise of food and other benefits from the successor. ⁹⁵ Of sixty-five examples where names are given, thirty-two of those taking on the holding were clearly relatives, and the remainder have surnames that differed from that of the departing tenant. A few of these at least were related in some way, for example as sons-in-law. One of the interpretations of these transactions is that they were in essence commercial contracts, in which the retiring tenant was selling the holding in return for an annuity. The old people were calculating the demand for land and could drive a hard bargain, while the new tenants were taking a risk that the old person would encumber the holding for a long time. However, this view of the agreement as a product of the market does not accord with the hint in some agreements that a son or daughter or some other relative was motivated by family loyalty, or at least by a sense of duty. There was also a broader social perception that the elderly should not sink into poverty. On the Worcester Priory estate in the 1340s, the custom was stated that ‘if an heir entered by licence of the lord into land, the widow should receive (annually) from the heir 3 cronnocks of rye, a cronnock of barley and a quarter of oats’ (a cronnock was 4 bushels). This clearly stated a principle supported by the lord of the manor, and set a standard that would avoid disputes. At Ombersley in 1416, it was said that the allowance of grain (a very basic 4 bushels of rye and 4 bushels of barley or drage) was ‘according to custom’, which again meant that the community and the lord were involved in the agreement. ⁹⁶

The notion that the maintenance of the elderly was required by custom might be contradicted or modified. In 1314 at Hallow (Worcestershire), on the Worcester Priory estate, the holding of a poor couple, Simon and Matilda le Tornour, was granted to an unrelated tenant, and the lord ‘out of charity’ ordered the new tenant to provide them with an annual allowance of wheat, rye, peas, and oats. ⁹⁷ Perhaps charity rather than custom was invoked because the new tenant was not an heir? At Ombersley in 1464 William Bishop’s son-in-law took over the holding, granting the standard customary quantity of rye and barley, but in addition twenty-two selions of land, probably amounting to 5 acres, the right to lop trees, grazing, and other benefits, ‘as a grant of alms’, because of William’s poverty, and by licence of the lord. ⁹⁸ Again the idea of charity was being introduced, so these agreements were neither commercial, nor enforced by custom. Perhaps the generous extra allowance of land was the charitable element? A more straightforward case involved Roger Bele of Sedgeberrow in 1315, who surrendered his holding to his son John. ‘The whole court’ found that Roger should be granted a house and an acre of land for life, and the lord consented to this. ⁹⁹ Here it seems that the son was under no precise obligation to provide for his father, and the community acting through the court pressured John to do the decent thing, with support from the lord.

Reluctance by successors, including relatives, to provide for the older generation must have led Worcester Priory officials to record their statement of custom in the 1340s. Individual agreements were being made throughout the region because of distrust, as old people valued a record in the court roll so that new tenants could be held to their commitments. One of the earliest agreements, made in 1281 for a Halesowen widow, Agnes Brid, gave an unusual amount of detail to protect her from non-compliance by the new tenant. The contract specified the dimensions of the house to be built for her, and the number of doors and windows. In addition to grain, she was to receive coal and firewood, and arrangements for their delivery were agreed; penalty payments were due if this did not happen. ¹⁰⁰ Other agreements contain similar hints of distrust, and two cases arose from a failure by the new tenant to keep to promises made. The retired people could also be at fault, and an agreement for a Teddington widow in 1326 raised the possibility that she might be ‘contentious’. A son from Blackwell who was supporting his mother had to move her into separate accommodation because, he alleged, she was unbearably quarrelsome. ¹⁰¹ Both sides were protected by the written word.

The accommodation arrangements specified in thirty-five maintenance agreements are a guide to the daily experience of contact between the generations. The retired person or couple would live in their successors’ household in three cases. In sixteen examples they were to live in the same house, but occupy a specified chamber. At Burton Dassett Southend, an excavated house had been provided with a first-floor chamber reached by a stair built on the end of the building. Cross-wings and upper storeys gave the inhabitants of houses more privacy, and allowed the elderly to be separated. The remainder of the retired peasants would be assigned their own building, like the new house built for Agnes Brid. On the sites of abandoned villages the foundations of a small buildings are sometimes visible at the back of a close, which may have been to accommodate a widow or elderly couple. An existing building such as a bakehouse, cart-house, barn, or sheepcote could be converted to a dwelling. If the retired people were to receive land, or keep livestock, they could be assigned part of a barn or other outbuilding. The conclusion must be that the generations wherever possible lived apart. The younger generation who were willing to support old people did not wish to share their lives with them in the same household.

To sum up, family loyalties should not be exaggerated. The limited attachment of young people to their households and villages is evident from land transfers and migration (see ‘Landholding after 1349’ in Chapter 3, and ‘Migration’ in Chapter 4). The new tenants who took on an elderly peasant’s holding were not compelled by an enforceable custom to guarantee food, clothing, and accommodation for life, but they were under pressure from the community and the lord. Such agreements were probably more prevalent than we are aware, because they were often based on informal verbal understandings. Those taking on land were guided by their consciences, and they must have had in mind that they would one day be old themselves, a point made forcefully in a fourteenth-century moralistic poem, in which a young son chides his father for ill-treating his grandfather. ¹⁰² They were also aware of the harm that neglecting the elderly would cause to their reputation. In spite of all of these tendencies that favoured making agreements and keeping them, some old people apparently had to give up their holdings without written assurance of subsequent support.

The maintenance agreement might also throw light on the dilemmas facing medieval peasants (and those attempting to interpret them) because they tell us about levels of consumption. Piers Plowman is portrayed as living very frugally, with an emphasis on a diet of oats and beans, and the poet evidently approved because he criticised the selfish greed of the labourers and beggars who demanded better food: white bread, and plenty of meat and fish. The food allowances for old people justify the view that peasants lived austerely, consuming cheaper cereals, and with only occasional hints of meat and dairy products. The explanation must be that the purpose of the agreements was to define a minimum, on the assumption that the retired people would have other sources of food or money. When the diets of wage-earners were specified, such as the food allowances for harvest workers at Wibtoft (Warwickshire) in 1402–3, they were given ample quantities of meat. They would not eat so well outside the harvest season, but they would not be reverting to oats and beans. A retired peasant who had held a yardland would surely not have been expected to live less well than a landless farm servant or labourer. ¹⁰³ The same applies to the cheap clothing promised to retired peasants, which did not change through the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whereas contemporaries complained of the high quality of labourers’ clothing (see ‘Peasant consumption’ in Chapter 8). There may have been notions in communities that it was virtuous to live modestly, but in general individual peasants were raising the standard of their consumption through the period, and the generations living around 1500 were better fed, better clothed, and more comfortably housed than their predecessors before 1350.

Finally, difficult decisions had to be made about exchange and commerce in the village. Did peasants, like Hawkyn in Piers Plowman, pursue profit to their own advantage, or were they restrained in their dealings, mindful of the common good, and aware of the advantages of reciprocal honesty? Peasants were familiar with the profits of farming. A holding could be said to have been improved in value (annual return) by 20s, meaning its surplus income from year to year had increased by that amount. Peasants in general could pursue many strategies to raise profit, for example, by changing the crops that they grew even from one year to another to take advantage of movements in price. ¹⁰⁴ Those with larger holdings could store crops in a barn over the winter in order to thresh and sell them in the spring and early summer as prices rose. The ‘hungry time’ in May and June was the profitable time for those with crops to sell. Lords’ officials spoke of land being rented at its ‘true value’, or when demand for land slackened after the Black Death they let a holding at a low rent but hoped that someone would come to offer more. Such language and the concept of obtaining the best price would be familiar to peasants. A peasant from Henbury (Gloucestershire) told his executors to arrange a transfer of land ‘the beste chepe they can’. ¹⁰⁵ The competition between market towns was based on calculations that sellers could be attracted to the markets where they would get good prices and plenty of buyers. We know how fickle peasants could be from the account book of John Heritage of Moreton in Marsh. He had a few regular clients who sold their wool to him every year but many after one or two sales moved on to others. They were searching for the best deal. ¹⁰⁶

However the question we are addressing is not whether peasants wished to buy cheap and sell dear, but if they did so selfishly and by flouting morality. Litigation alleged bad practices, such as selling oxen incapable of work while claiming that they were strong and healthy.

The retail sale of foodstuffs was regulated by the various assizes enforced in the view of frankpledge. Here we see the ‘just price’ transposed into practical law enforcement, as the weight of loaves and cost of ale varied with grain prices, and butchers were not expected to make excessive profits. Villagers participated as ale tasters, jurors, and affeerers advising on amercements, so they all knew about the morality of price fixing. Lending money raised more serious problems as charging excessive interest led to the serious charge of usury, which the church regarded as a grievous moral offence. ¹⁰⁷ Lenders were entitled to receive damages, because they suffered from losses caused by the absence of the money loaned. In the manor court the original claim for damages was often reduced by the court, so at Cleeve Prior in 1389 Geoffrey Blacberd, who was owed 2s, claimed 6d in damages but was awarded 4d, which was still a rather high rate of 17 per cent. ¹⁰⁸

Peasant credit is often represented as exploitation, with those with cash to spare (beneficed clergy, widows, tenants with very large holdings, traders) being identified as ‘money lenders’ who habitually advanced cash in order to make a profit. An alternative expectation would be that better-off tenants lent money to their poorer neighbours, creating dependency and perpetuating social inequality. To test these negative interpretations of the operation of credit in a peasant society seventy-two pleas of debt or related litigation recorded for Cleeve Prior between 1314 and 1377 have been analysed. Most were probably not attempts to recover cash loans, but resulted from delays in payments for goods or wages. Of the 112 individuals appearing as owing or being owed money, only eight were outsiders, so the credit relationships were being formed among Cleeve villagers. Few of those lending or being owed money appear more than once, so specialist ‘money lenders’ were not identifiable. Instead of the rich exploiting the poor the ‘lenders’ and the ‘borrowers’ had a very similar profile of landholding, they held a half-yardland, a yardland or a mill. The debts had arisen from the normal interactions of peasant society, as people bought and sold, paid for work done, or advanced cash in small quantities (less than 5s) for short terms. ¹⁰⁹ Loans to cottagers and smallholders would not be the subject of litigation as there was no point in attempting to recover loans from those without large resources. We might speculate that poorer people were involved in an informal credit network in which small loans were made for short terms without records.

Conclusion

The poem Piers Plowman presented its readers with an idealistic vision of a harmonious world in which everyone did their duty, but this was difficult to achieve and contrasted with the reality of a sinful society corrupted by money and self-interest. The peasant Piers stood for honest peasant values of simplicity, hard work, morality, and frugality, who was opposed by lazy wasters, greedy labourers, and the scheming deceiver, Hawkyn.

West-midland peasants supported the state by participating in law enforcement and co-operating in tax collection. These commitments to public life also show some self-interest because they gained from practising self-government sanctioned by higher authority. Like the rest of the ‘political society’ to which they aspired to belong, they took sides in political disputes at the highest level. They were not openly or comprehensively opposed to their lords, and were complicit in manorial government. They were even drawn into affinities of aristocrats who were not their lords, and became involved in dangerous adventures. In dealing with their lords they fought their own corner, and resisted impositions and restrictions which they saw as unjust. In pursuing a goal of freedom, they undermined repressive institutions. Peasants belonged to church congregations, and attempted to be good Christians, believing in the salvation that Piers Plowman made his explicit goal. As active managers and members of their parish, they moulded religious practices that accorded with their way of life. In dealing with the natural world they had no conception of conservation, but their exploitation of natural resources was subject to internal checks and balances within peasant society combined with some pressures from outside. In consequence, profit-seeking by individuals was restrained and patterns of land use benefited the whole community. The same complex of motives can be seen in the interactions between individuals, their families, and the village. The older generation was not automatically supported by the family and community but was saved from destitution by a complex mixture of filial duty, community pressure, charitable impulses, intervention by the lord, and pangs of conscience. People were caught up in community efforts which had a meaning for the participants beyond individual self-interest. They participated in dramatic and musical performances, which could be connected with parish fund-raising and collective endeavours. Their plays are lost, but tangible outcomes were the church buildings, which survive in their hundreds.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0010

¹ J.A. Alford, ed., A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley, CA, 1988); A. Cole and A. Galloway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 2014).

² M.L. Samuels, ‘Dialect and Grammar’, in Companion, ed., Alford, pp. 201–21.

³ R.W.V. Elliott, ‘The Langland Country’, in Piers Plowman: Critical Approaches, edited by S.S. Hussey (London, 1969), pp. 226–44.

⁴ Among a number of literary scholars who discuss this theme, M. Stokes, Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman: A Reading of the B Text Vision (London, 1984); R. Lister, ‘The Peasants of Piers Plowman and Its Audience’, in Peasants and Countrymen in Literature, edited by K. Parkinson and M. Priestman (Roehampton, 1982), pp. 71–90.

⁵ R.F. Green, ‘John Ball’s Letters. Literary History and Historical Literature’, in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 176–200.

⁶ The brief summary that follows is based on the B text: G. Kane and E. Talbot, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London, 1975).

⁷ D. Green, ‘Nobility and Chivalry’; D. Lepine, ‘The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy’, in Historians on John Gower, edited by S. Rigby and S. Echard (John Gower Society, 12, 2019), pp. 141–65, 243–69.

⁸ D. Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C Text (London, 1979), pp. 100–1.

⁹ R.H. Hilton, Bondmen Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973), p. 165; Z. Razi, ‘The Struggles between the Abbots of Halesowen and Their Tenants in The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R.H. Hilton, edited by T.H. Aston and others (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 151–67, especially pp. 165–6.

¹⁰ 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).

¹¹ E.G. Kimball, ed., Rolls of the Warwickshire and Coventry Sessions of the Peace 1377–1397 (DS, 16, 1939), p. 101; for Harryes, Northamptonshire Record Office, Spencer roll 216. On the general finding, J. Masschaele, Jury, State and Society in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2008).

¹² R. Goheen, ‘Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England’, American Historical Review 96 (1991), p. 48.

¹³ WCL, E16; Kimball, ed., Sessions of the Peace, pp. 95, 159, 163, 166.; B.H. Putnam, ed., The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death (New York, 1908), Appendix, pp. 223–7.

¹⁴ L.R. Poos, ‘The Social Context of the Statute of Labourers Enforcement’, Law and History Review 1 (1983), pp. 27–52.

¹⁵ WA, ref. 705:56, BA 3910/22(x).

¹⁶ R. Smith, ‘The English Peasantry, 1250–1650’, in The Peasantries of Europe, edited by T. Scott (Harlow, 1998), pp. 33–71, especially pp. 353–4.

¹⁷ H.J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62 (Manchester, 1966), pp. 36–47; G.C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Harvard, 1941), p. 330.

¹⁸ M.A. Faraday, ed., Worcestershire Taxes in the 1520s (WHS, new series, 19, 2003), pp. 1–21.

¹⁹ R. Hoyle, ed., The Military Survey of Gloucestershire, 1522 (GRS, 6, 1993), pp. 72–85, 87–93, 195–207.

²⁰ J.R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown (Past and Present Supplement, no. 1, 1975), pp. 15–34; TNA, E213/382.

²¹ W.M. Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c.1200–1815, edited by R. Bonney (Oxford, 1991), pp. 19–52.

²² M. Forrest, ‘Patterns of Economic Change in the South-West during the Fifteenth Century’, EcHR 70 (2017), pp. 423–51.

²³ Magdalen College, Oxford, Quinton EP 35/9.

²⁴ UNMSC, MiM 128/6.

²⁵ R.E. Glasscock, ed., The Lay Subsidy of 1334 (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 11, 1975), p. 323.

²⁶ M. Jurkowski, C.L. Smith, and D. Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales, 1188–1688 (Kew, 1998), pp. 7–8, 12–15; J.R. Maddicott, ‘The Oath of Marlborough, 1209: Fear, Government and Popular Allegiance in the Reign of King John’, EHR 126 (2011), pp. 281–318.

²⁷ R.R. Darlington, ed., The Cartulary of Worcester Cathedral Priory (Register 1) (Pipe Roll Society, 76, 1962–3), p. 173.

²⁸ J. Hunt, ‘Families at War: Royalists and Montfortians in the West Midlands’, Midland History 22 (1997), pp. 1–34, especially p. 4.

²⁹ D.A. Carpenter, ‘English Peasants in Politics, 1258–1267’, P&P 136 (1992), pp. 3–42.

³⁰ J.O. Halliwell, ed., The Chronicle of William de Rishanger … The Miracles of Simon de Montfort (Camden Society, 1840), pp. 70, 100–1.

³¹ Hereford Cathedral Library, R1162; C. Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 141–6.

³² A.K. Grundy, Richard II and the Rebel Earl (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 128, 169–70; Valente, Practice of Revolt, pp. 189–91.

³³ R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 71–3; WCRO, CR1886/175.

³⁴ T. Johnson, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2020), pp. 269–75.

³⁵ W.P. Marett, ed., A Calendar of the Register of Henry Wakefield Bishop of Worcester 1375–95 (WHS, new series, 7, 1972), pp. xliv–xlvi.

³⁶ B. Wells-Furby, The Berkeley Estate 1281–1417: Its Economy and Development (BGAS, 2012), p. 130.

³⁷ WHR, pp. 194, 231, 248, 275, 286, 294, 310.

³⁸ E.S. Fegan, ed., Journal of Prior William More (WHS, 1914), p. 203.

³⁹ SCLA, DR5/2537; GA, D678/98C.

⁴⁰ Faraday, ed., Worcestershire Taxes, pp. 8–9, 35–6, 40–2, 60–2.

⁴¹ TNA, KB9/202/42, 43, 44; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1413–16, p. 111; 1416–22, p. 147; WCL E45, E46, E49, E51, E52. Their animals damaged crops when they grazed on the land of both lord and tenants, but that was not unusual.

⁴² C. Dyer, ‘The Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English Village’, The Fifteenth Century 4 (2004), pp. 135–57, especially p. 149.

⁴³ W. St Clair Baddeley, A Cotteswold Manor: Being the History of Painswick (London, 1929), pp. 105–6.

⁴⁴ Palmer and Parker, Burton Dassett Southend, small finds report can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5284/1083492.

⁴⁵ A. Sutherland, ‘Non-Armorial Personal Seals and the Expression of Identity in Rural English Communities, c.1175–1349’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Leicester, 2020), Appendix, pp. 137–55.

⁴⁶ Palmer and Parker, Burton Dassett Southend, p. 73.

⁴⁷ B. F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977), p. 231.

⁴⁸ WCL, E7, E28.

⁴⁹ GA, D678/61.

⁵⁰ WCL, E20; E28.

⁵¹ The whole series of Cleeve court records from E1 to E46; C559; C563.

⁵² R.H. Hilton, ‘Gloucester Abbey Leases of the Late Thirteenth Century’, in English Peasantry, pp. 139–60 (individual agreements); Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 67–9 (collective negotiations).

⁵³ WA, ref. 705:56, BA 3910/27 (xvii).

⁵⁴ WCL, E14, E28; C. Dyer, ‘Small-Town Conflict in the Later Middle Ages: Events at Shipston-on-Stour’, Urban History 9 (1992), pp. 183–210; Hilton, English Peasantry, p. 61.

⁵⁵ C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? (Oxford, 2005), pp. 67–70; C. Dyer, A Country Merchant (Oxford, 2012), pp. 171–2.

⁵⁶ VCH Worcs, vol. 3, p. 150.

⁵⁷ Dyer, ‘Small-Town Conflict’, pp. 196–7.

⁵⁸ Such discoveries have been made at Lark Stoke (Warwickshire).

⁵⁹ C. Burgess, ‘Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Lessons from London and Bristol’, EHR 117 (2002), pp. 306–32.

⁶⁰ F. Somers, ed., Halesowen Churchwardens’ Accounts (1487–1582) (WHS, 1952, 1953).

⁶¹ M.A. Faraday, ed., The Lay Subsidy for Shropshire 1524–7 (Shropshire Record Series, 3, 1999), pp. 32–3; CR Romsley, p. 276.

⁶² R.N. Swanson and D. Guyatt, eds., The Visitation and Court Book of Hartlebury, 1401–1598 (WHS, new series, 24, 2013); WA, ref. 009:1, BA 2636//37(iii), fos.78–83.

⁶³ TNA, E328/25/1, 2, 3, 6, 7; Dyer, Age of Transition, p. 69.

⁶⁴ K. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval Diocese (Philadelphia, 2001).

⁶⁵ E.A.B. Barnard, ed., Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of Badsey with Aldington from 1521 to 1571 (Hampstead, 1913), pp. 9–22.

⁶⁶ Swanson and Guyatt, eds., Hartlebury, p. 185.

⁶⁷ For example, there were eight in Forest of Dean parishes, VCH Glouc, vol. 5.

⁶⁸ Swanson and Guyatt, eds., Hartlebury, p. 258.

⁶⁹ N. Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2017); C. Pickford and N. Pevsner, Warwickshire (The Buildings of England, New Haven and London, 2016), p. 702.

⁷⁰ G. Dark, Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2017); Dyer, ‘Political Life’, p. 156 for the case of Bledington’s windows, funded by peasants.

⁷¹ Although the Doom has not survived, there were paintings of the life of St Nicholas: M. Gill, ‘The Lost Wall Paintings of Halesowen Church’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 3rd series, 16 (1998), pp. 133–42.

⁷² J.A. Ford, John Mirk’s Festial. Orthodoxy, Lollardy and the Common People in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 76–9.

⁷³ Swanson and Guyatt, eds., Hartlebury, pp. 186, 248; W.H. Campbell, The Landscape of Pastoral Care in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 122–35.

⁷⁴ Portable Antiquities Scheme, accessible at https://finds.org.uk/database, ampulla from Hartlebury, WAW 2ADFFD; another from Blaisdon (Gloucestershire) has a T which apparently shows that it came from the shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury: GLO 89CA21.

⁷⁵ Portable Antiquities Scheme, accessible at https://finds.org.uk/database, GLO BD3800; GLO A14B8D; GLO SE9448.

⁷⁶ I. Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005), pp. 102, 136, 180.

⁷⁷ Ford, Mirk’s Festial, pp. 99–100, 147.

⁷⁸ S. Wager, Woods, Wolds and Groves: The Woodland of Medieval Warwickshire (British Archaeological Reports, British Series, 269, 1998), pp. 167–8; on the general background, S. Kilby, Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape (Hatfield, 2020).

⁷⁹ P. Warde, The Invention of Sustainability. Nature and Destiny, c.1500–1870 (Cambridge, 2019).

⁸⁰ A. Watkins, ‘The Woodland Economy of the Forest of Arden in the Later Middle Ages’, Midland History 18 (1993), pp. 19–36, especially pp. 22–4.

⁸¹ Watkins, ‘Woodland Economy’, pp. 25–8.

⁸² SCLA, DR5/2357.

⁸³ C.E. Hart, ‘The Dean Forest Eyre of 1282’ (MA dissertation, University of Bristol, 1953), p. 160; Rec Feck For, p. 133.

⁸⁴ This paragraph depends on Wager, Woods, Wolds and Groves, especially pp. 79–94.

⁸⁵ Curia Regis Rolls, 13, p. 359; 14, pp. 10, 82–3, 315–16; C. Elrington, ed., Abstracts of Feet of Fines Relating to Gloucestershire 1199–1299 (GRS 16, 2003), p. 46.

⁸⁶ P.R. Coss, Lordship, Knighthood and Locality. A Study of English Society c.1180–c.1280 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 103–6.

⁸⁷ J.R. Birrell, ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conflicts in the Thirteenth Century’, P&P 117 (1987), pp. 22–49, especially pp. 46, 48–9.

⁸⁸ Bodleian Library, MS Top. Warwick C1; Wager, Woods, Wolds and Groves, pp. 88–9, 90, 96.

⁸⁹ SCLA, DR5/2360; Wager, Woods, Wolds and Groves, p. 112.

⁹⁰ WA, ref. 705:56, BA3910/33(iv); Fegan, ed., More.

⁹¹ Fegan, ed., More, pp. 90–1, 308.

⁹² A. Hanham, ed., Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton, 1479–1580 (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, 15, 1970), p. xi; D. Dymond, ed., The Churchwardens’ Book at Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire 1496–c.1540 (Cambridge Record Society, 17, 2004), pp. lx–lxviii.

⁹³ Fegan, More, pp. 87, 309, 327, 332, 388, 405.

⁹⁴ R.B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robin Hood (London, 1976), pp. 203–7.

⁹⁵ R.M. Smith, ‘The Manorial Court and the Elderly Tenant in Late Medieval England’, in Life, Death and the Elderly, edited by M. Pelling and R.M. Smith (London, 1991), pp. 39–61; M. Page, ‘Manor Courts and the Retirement of Customary Tenants on the Bishop of Winchester’s Estates before the Black Death’, Southern History 35 (2013), pp. 23–43.

⁹⁶ Reg Wig, p. 7; WA, ref. 705:56, BA 3910/24.

⁹⁷ WCL, E7.

⁹⁸ WA, ref. 705:56, BA3910/27 (ix).

⁹⁹ WCL, E7.

¹⁰⁰ J. Amphlett, Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, 1272–1307 (WHS, 1910), pp. 166–8.

¹⁰¹ WCL, E10; E17.

¹⁰² Homans, English Villagers, pp. 154–6.

¹⁰³ British Library Add Roll 49,762. Harvesters’ food cost 44s 4d: bread (23 per cent); ale (32 per cent); meat (41 per cent); fish (2 per cent) and dairy produce (3 per cent).

¹⁰⁴ B. Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East. The Evidence from Tithes, 1270–1536 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 134–44.

¹⁰⁵ WA, ref. 008:7, BA3510, 1538/46.

¹⁰⁶ Dyer, Country Merchant, pp. 106–7.

¹⁰⁷ J. Le Goff, YourMoney or Your Life. Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York, 1990).

¹⁰⁸ WCL, E34.

¹⁰⁹ C. Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth Century England (Oxford, 2009), pp. 149–75.