A regional study has the advantage of being specific and concrete, but local examples enable us to understand more about general approaches to the past, so reference has been made to sustainability, social mobility, sense of identity, proto-industrialization, and popular culture. Firm generalizations are made difficult by the paradoxes of peasant history. Peasants can be presented as egalitarian, recorded as holding similar amounts of land as many as their neighbours, sharing the legal and social status of other villagers, and by the rules of the common fields having equal access to resources. However, some peasants were finding ways of gaining in wealth, by developing new land and by buying or leasing land. They could raise their status by taking on offices, by building a house with a cross wing, or by riding a better horse with a decorated harness. Many broke the rules of the common fields, by keeping too many animals on the pastures and not preventing them from trampling their neighbours’ crops, while participating in the village community, acting together to manage common assets for the good of all. The definition of peasants included their closely knit families, working together and living under the patriarchal authority of the head of the household. Families had to cope with tensions developing into disputes, and younger members left home for other households and villages, even abandoning their inheritance and leaving their ageing parents to negotiate support with an unrelated successor. Peasants combined subsistence farming, in which the crops were consumed by the household, with production for the market. They admired ideals of frugality and sparse living, while consuming foodstuffs and manufactures which they purchased. They even acquired luxury goods, such as Prussian chests and stoneware drinking vessels. They were primarily agricultural producers, but were drawn into manufacture, not just by taking on trades and crafts as an individual, such as working as a carpenter, but also becoming involved, as entrepreneurs as well as workers, in large-scale industries aimed at distant markets. Villages could not be self-sustaining communities satisfying their needs among themselves. They sold produce in the towns, and bought goods not easily obtained in the country. They hired lawyers occasionally, and employed building workers habitually.
General conclusions about the results of peasant initiatives and activities are best reached by looking at the end of the period and surveying the countryside after more than three centuries of change. The brave new world of the sixteenth century may seem far removed from everyday life of west-midland peasant communities. The Tudor monarchy, new forms of government, Protestant reform, audacious voyages to new worlds, a renaissance culture, and the beginnings of the scientific revolution, all suggest a clear break with the past. However, the advances made by peasants helped to make these novelties possible.
In the period up to 1540 the collective needs of the whole of society, but especially decisions made by peasants, tilted the balance of farming in the west midlands. A peasant-led movement had brought more acres under the plough in the thirteenth century. Subsequently the region became more pastoral. The numerous livestock on pastures of all kinds by 1500 were not just promoting the profits of their owners, but also stimulating commerce in the market towns and satisfying consumer demand for a diet with plenty of meat. The size of peasant holdings were crucial to their well-being and position in the social hierarchy. Holdings were assigned to them, but they could also adjust their size by such means as negotiated subdivisions at inheritance, and by subletting. The fragmentation of landholding stimulated by population growth and commercialization in the thirteenth century did not overwhelm the landholding structure. Larger holdings survived and pressures from lords and communities prevented, for example, the wholesale colonization of wastes by smallholdings. At important stages of the subdivision of standard holdings, the process was halted so that yardlands were not all divided into halves and quarters. Those decisions were made by lords and the peasant tenants themselves. After 1349, with demographic pressure relaxed, more land became available for tenants, both in composite holdings of previously separate units, and in demesne land held on lease. In the west-midland region generally tenants of larger holdings, such as yardlands, formed an important section of society, and some very large holdings exceeding 60 acres emerged. These units of land holding were accumulated and kept in existence by the choice of their tenants.
The holdings that survived and emerged at the end of our period were farmed in new ways. Peasants are often thought to have been conservative and resistant to change, but the three centuries of this enquiry were marked by a series of innovations. In the thirteenth century, land was being converted to arable, and cultivation became more intensive as parts of the open field lying fallow were fenced off and planted with spring sown crops, some intended for fodder. In the fourteenth century, and not just after 1349, arable was turned into grass leys, and open fields were subdivided so that four fields were being worked, enabling three-quarters of the land to be cropped each year. At the same time the enclosure movement that was already active in the thirteenth century in the woodlands spread to the open fields, some of which were enclosed by agreement. These changes all needed approval by lords and they sometimes encouraged them. There were damaging enclosures by lords of champion villages in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but many other changes came from peasant initiatives.
Through all these complex changes in the holding, management, and use of land, peasants were gaining more control of their lives and their holdings. Serfdom was a restriction on personal freedom, but was intimately linked to tenancy. In practice it can be said with some justification that serfdom fell short of controlling peasants’ landholding, but financial penalties were attached to the lack of freedom. The powers over serfs claimed by lords were a constant threat looming over the lives of the peasantry. The peasants undermined servile institutions by non-cooperation, and eroded the authority of lords consistently from the early days of imposition around 1200 through to its dying days around 1500. Customary and servile tenants aimed to gain the same control over land as their free neighbours, and by 1500 they were paying cash rents, owing no labour services, were no longer subject to tallage or marriage fines, and could practice the same type of succession planning as free tenants in arranging for the transmission of land to the next generation. Copyhold for lives and reversion agreements provided means for selecting heirs.
Peasants acquired artisan skills and developed rural industries which overshadowed the industrial initiatives of lords. The countryside was peppered with individual enterprises, with weavers, tailors, building workers, turners, coopers, and many others, reaching a higher density in woodlands and concentrations in Forest of Dean. The emergence of a major clothmaking district in south Gloucestershire owed much to urban entrepreneurs, but the peasants held fulling mills and rural clothiers emerged from an artisan and peasant background. The industry was based on peasant weavers and spinners drawn into activities initially to supplement their agricultural work. Peasants played active roles in the growth of an urban network throughout the region. Of course lords promoted towns and to some extent chose sites at the beginning of urban growth, but peasants made the towns by settling in them in their thousands, and by replenishing the numbers of townspeople over the centuries. Towns were numerous and populous because of their close relationship with the rural population.
Peasants possessed individual freedoms in the period, not just because they shook off serfdom, but they also escaped from the close control of families, hence their ability to migrate. The relationship was not antagonistic because families helped their young by finding them positions as servants in suitable households, supporting them if they were not well treated, and helping to set them up in new lives with grants and bequests of livestock, implements, or cash. Women showed an independent spirit in managing holdings when necessary, finding opportunities in commerce and crafts both in country and in town, and as widows sometimes resisting pressure to remarry.
And although it could suit those in authority that peasants formed strong communities, the main impetus to work together and observe the rules of open-field farming came from those most directly involved. The strength of communities grew in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as they took over new functions such as tax collection, developed their legal skills in the manor courts, and took over responsibility for the management of the parish church. Far from declining after 1349 or 1400, they became more active in church fund raising, dramatic performances, road building, and framing the rules of social control. They believed themselves to be part of political society, so when the state moved against vagabonds they joined in the campaign, but they collected money in the ‘common box’ to relieve their own poor. As poor laws were introduced from 1536, the parish became the unit of local government capable of managing the welfare system.
The end of the peasantry has often been regarded as an essential part of the modernization of society, and the years around 1500 are claimed as part of the dying process, but the west midlands does not fit this pattern. A different type of peasant emerged after three centuries of change, but they are recognizable still as peasants. In some respects they participated in modernization. In a region that was not in the forefront of industrial growth, the suggestion can be made that a third of working time was devoted to non-agricultural tasks. Historians analysing occupational specialization in the early modern period believe that the growing industrial sector in the sixteenth century marked a stage in the trend to an upward spiral of production and consumption in later centuries. The prehistory of that trend towards ‘the first industrial country’ began before 1500. Wider cultural and political developments point to the same element of continuity over the period between 1200 and 1800, such as the literacy of the fifteenth century, or the ‘shared understanding of governance’. 1 Peasants had created the conditions for these important changes, and their contributions deserve wider recognition. 2
Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0011
1 L. van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: the European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (Leiden, 2009).
2 T. Johnson, Law in Common. Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2020), p. 269.