1

Introduction

This book is not a response to the neglect of peasants by historians. Their historical significance has often been demonstrated, but this book is a new venture in the sense that no one has attempted an overview of the importance of peasants over a wide range of themes, from agriculture to religion. ¹ The approach is peasant-centred, so it seeks to identify their contributions, and the changes in which they participated, from their perspective. It is concerned with peasants’ ideas and outlook, the controversies in which they became embroiled, the decisions that they made, and the actions that they took. Peasants were not gifted with free choices but were under pressure from external forces, such as the demands of their lords and the state, demographic movements, the hidden hand of the market, economic growth and recession, environmental factors including disasters, and political and religious movements. However, plenty has been written about these long-term tendencies, and my purpose is to give attention to peasants and their communities as they experienced these changes, resisted or accommodated them, and took advantage of opportunities they presented. Peasants varied greatly, and among them many different life chances and experiences can be found. Viewed as a mass, if we ignore their names or individual identities, they can be depicted as weak, miserable, poverty-stricken, ignorant, and unchanging. The narrative is often a negative account of crisis and decline. However, if disaggregated into individuals or small groups, a very different picture emerges of people with varied ambitions, concerns, knowledge, and the ability to make something of their lives.

Doubts about the use of the word ‘peasant’ were voiced briefly in the late twentieth century. It was alleged that the term could not be applied in medieval or modern England because the defining characteristics of peasants were their subordination to the family group, and their lack of participation in the market. ² For a time the rejection of the term peasants had some influence, and historians experimented with an alternative vocabulary, such as ‘villagers’ or even ‘agriculturalists’, but wiser views eventually prevailed and it was realized that the rural population across the world and over long periods could have different ways of life, but bore enough resemblance to one another to be usefully described as peasants. ³

‘Peasant’ can be applied to a wide range of country people who possessed land in relatively small quantities (as small as the plot attached to a cottage, as large as 50 acres). They often produced their own food using family labour, so to some extent they were not dependent on the market. They were relatively poor and were socially subordinate, though they gained some benefit from belonging to communities. They were not farmers, who were a special category of leaseholders, often holding large amounts of land, employing labour and producing for the market. Some peasants can also be called labourers because they earned wages part-time, but most of them lived partly on the produce of their holdings. Many peasants were also serfs, but their servile status did not define them, as there were numerous free peasants. ‘Villagers’ is an alternative term of limited value, because although all rural people lived in units of government called villages or vills, the word village is often reserved for large compact settlements, and most people lived in hamlets or scattered farms. Peasants were not all male, because wives, daughters, and female servants formed part of the household and did much of the labour on the holding, and in some circumstances, especially widowhood, women were in charge. Peasants were involved in agriculture, but they did not disqualify themselves from the category of peasant by working also in crafts or retail trade. ⁴ All of this is written in the past tense, because the example of late medieval England is in the forefront of the author’s attention. However, the definition can be applied widely. In the fourteenth century the majority of the English, European, and Eurasian population can be described as peasants, and although they have become extinct in modern England, and have greatly diminished in continental Europe (though still surviving in some countries and can be known as ‘family farmers’), in Asia, Africa, and much of South America they have modernized and are active in great numbers, accounting according to one estimate for a third of the world’s population. ⁵

By including the term peasant in our historical vocabulary, it is much easier to communicate with other disciplines because the word is used and understood by social scientists, archaeologists, and geographers. International comparisons are also helped by sharing terminology; if we can agree on the types of people under discussion, similarities and differences can be more easily identified. An argument for ‘English exceptionalism’, that is, the belief that England was uniquely different in having no peasantry (and in many other ways), prevents any attempt at comparison.

This book has been made possible by a recent tendency in historical writing to give medieval peasants more prominence. For a long time, historians were using such phrases as ‘lords and peasants’ and tended to focus on peasants in their role as tenants, so they were seen as payers of rent, performers of labour services, and attenders at the lords’ courts. Lords were imagined to have been the main producers and innovators. It was widely assumed that the planning of villages, the organization of field systems, farming methods, and much else followed mainly from initiatives by lords. Now we have learnt not to regard peasants as appendages of the seigneurial regime, nor as its victims, but as players in their own right, with resources, traditions, and ideas of their own.

The ‘peasant-centred’ approach has come from a number of different directions. An important influence has been historians on the left, who are associated with the ‘history from below’ approach. Peasant revolts, and especially the English Rising of 1381 has attracted interest from the progressive historians since the 1890s. ⁶ Although historians from a Marxist perspective have written about rebellious peasants, they have not been as ‘peasant-centred’ as might be expected. One obstacle has been Marx’s assumption that the industrial working class was uniquely capable of revolution, so that other discontented plebeians were overshadowed. Also, the analysis of the ‘feudal mode of production’ focusses attention on the ‘struggle for rent’ between lords and peasants, which is portrayed as giving feudal society its dynamic capacity to change. ⁷ This is difficult to reconcile with an agenda to give pride of place to social differences within the village, peasant culture, and interactions among peasants. It is, however, important to be reminded that lordship was a presence and a strong influence throughout, which some enthusiasts for peasant autonomy are prone to forget.

Since the 1970s an important development in studies of peasants in the Middle Ages has been the interest of historians and historical geographers with a strong social science background, based mainly at Cambridge. Their initial agenda was to investigate the extent to which the demographic regime of early modern north-western Europe, based on the European Marriage Pattern, went back before the sixteenth century. This research broadened to include not just marriage, but such subjects as the land market, inheritance, social welfare, servants, and credit. ⁸ The main sources were manorial court rolls, and the lords’ presence is fully acknowledged in these investigations. Beginning rather earlier than the Cambridge research, the Toronto school of historians were also approaching peasants from a social science perspective, and they carried out comprehensive analyses of village life, with a special concern for office holding and stratification. ⁹

The history of women and gender in general has drawn on the abundant sources relating to the aristocracy, nunneries, and urban society, but peasant women have received a good deal of attention. In particular their leading role in brewing and selling ale has been highlighted, and also their contribution to rural labour, raising issues relating to pay differences between male and female workers. ¹⁰ A controversial view, applied more to urban than peasant women, suggests that in the shortage of labour after 1349 women became more independent, their marriages were delayed, prolonging the demographic recession, and in the long term they made an important contribution to the supply of workers. ¹¹

Economic historians tend to be drawn to the abundant manorial accounts and surveys which have primarily provided information about lords’ demesnes and rent income. They include receipts from tithes, which as they represent a tenth of the crops of each parish, are a guide to peasant crops. Notable work on tithes came from a study of peasant grain production in Durham over two centuries. Among other findings, it was shown that peasants changed the acreage of types of grain in relation to price movements. ¹² Mills were an important source of revenue for lords, who usually leased out the mill for a substantial sum of money. The miller drew an income and paid the rent from the tolls paid by the peasants who were compelled to take their grain to their lords’ mill. However, some mills escaped from close supervision, mainly before 1200, and the peasant tenants who paid a modest rent for a mill outside manorial control had the chance of profiting from the toll revenue. ¹³ A sophisticated study of demesne policy in the fourteenth century, which explained the various decisions about agricultural management made by lords’ officials (many of them peasant reeves), made comparisons between demesnes and peasant holdings. An important finding was that peasants who seemed to have small numbers of animals actually kept a higher density of livestock than many lords. Similar conclusions have emerged from peasant animals recorded in tax records. ¹⁴ The historian who had done the most thorough study of lords’ agriculture based mainly on manorial accounts turned to assess our understanding of the peasant economy in the early fourteenth century, and concluded that tenants could derive advantages from fixed rents, and could profitably sublet their land. ¹⁵

These are just some examples of the growing appreciation of the need to include peasants in any analysis of medieval society and economy, and they are selected from dozens of publications which give peasants careful attention. There are useful contributions to peasant history in the Agrarian Histories, general surveys of medieval economy and society, and the various handbooks aimed at both students and general readers. ¹⁶ Taking peasants seriously as historical players in their own right is a feature of work on the early medieval period, for which sources are not so thin as is sometimes supposed. ¹⁷

Specialized fields of historical enquiry have also extended their scope to include the ordinary people of the medieval countryside. Legal historians whose concern was understandably focussed on parliament, the Westminster courts, and the workings of the common law have devoted more attention to manorial courts. This has led to them analysing customary law, exploring procedures such as the role of juries, and examining issues of tenure. All of these were directly the concern of peasants, and have led to legal historians appreciating the knowledge and understanding shown by peasant litigants and officials. ¹⁸ Peasants were by no means confined to their local courts, and had a role as jurors in royal courts. ¹⁹ Canon law courts, so important in their influence on marriage, were dependent like the secular courts on ordinary people prepared to report on their neighbours’ behaviour, and on those bringing forward litigation. ²⁰ A similar development among historians of religion has led them to give more attention to ‘popular’ religion, and to take more seriously expressions of piety from all ranks of the laity. Participation by peasants in the life of the church has resulted from greater interest in parish churches and the parish in general. ²¹ The study of late medieval English literature has traditionally been focussed on works intended for an elite audience, and historians rather than literary scholars showed more interest in such popular work as the Robin Hood ballads and the shorter pieces sometimes called ‘political songs’. Historical interest has been maintained, but literary scholars have shown more concern for works appreciated by a large general audience. ²² Linguistic studies were always anchored in everyday speech, but without explicit links being made to peasant society. The interaction between social historians and place-name scholars has enabled local names to be explored more directly as evidence for peasant perceptions of their surroundings. ²³

Medieval archaeology and its close allies, landscape history and vernacular architecture, began together in the mid twentieth century in a surge of interest in villages, fields, and rural non-elite houses. The practitioners proclaimed their objectives of discovering authentic peasant houses and exploring the daily lives of peasants. ²⁴ To some extent that initial focus has shifted, as the study of castles, churches, monasteries, and above all towns occupied important places on the agenda. The archaeology of the peasantry has survived with the ‘peasant house’ still a central concern but now with more interest in material culture and the environmental context. Landscape history (or landscape archaeology as it is often called) has not lost its early enthusiasm for rural settlements, fields, and associated sites. ²⁵

This book can draw on the insights and achievements of many scholars, and they indicate the possibility of a broad enquiry into the full peasant experience, giving a more complete picture of the peasant contribution to late medieval life. Such a survey is more difficult to achieve if it is spread over a very large geographical area, and so is focussed here on one region, the west midlands. This region, consisting of the counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire, was an obvious choice because the author is familiar with its documents and landscape. Treating the three counties together was not an original idea, because it was chosen by Rodney Hilton for his study, modelled on French regional surveys, which covers the whole social spectrum concentrating on the period around 1300. ²⁶ Writing this book has been aided not only by many works of Hilton’s, but also by a dozen other scholars who have researched and written about the region and edited major texts, many of them influenced by him.

The region offers many other advantages. Its landscape is very varied, which allows comparisons to be made between open-field country with large villages, and woodlands where people lived in hamlets and in isolation, with some high ground (though no mountains) and areas of wetland. No region is typical, but the west midland region is free of idiosyncratic or very specialized characteristics. It was not dominated by a powerful lord, like county Durham, nor was it as urbanized as Suffolk, or as densely populated or intensively farmed as Norfolk, nor as unusually free as in Kent, nor as industrialized as parts of the south-west.

The period covered is divided into equal parts by the plague epidemic of 1349, and the content of the book reflects the differences between the growth of the thirteenth century which slowed or ended between 1300 and 1350, and the subsequent period of retreat but also new developments. We might be drawn into the belief that the Black Death was an overwhelming disaster and a decisive turning point, and certainly the west midlands suffered a very high mortality in what one source calls ‘the first pestilence’ (in the context of the subsequent lesser outbreak in 1361–2). However, many developments began well before the fateful year and continued, such as the advance of peasant freedom, the rise of peasants with larger holding, the desertion of villages and abandonment of cultivated land, and the growth of some towns and industries. It is often said that women advanced their status and independence after 1349, but the records used for this book show women behaving decisively in the management of their inheritance in the early fourteenth century.

How can we write peasant-centred history, emphasizing their contribution to change without any sources written by them? There are no letters, diaries, or autobiographies. Instead, the main sources were written by clerks working in the administration of lords, church, and state and serving their purposes. We must use skill and imagination to counter the perspectives of the institutions which filtered and coloured the information that they provide. This is not so difficult because behind many of the sources lie the spoken words of peasants. They reported to the courts, and as litigants argued their cases, and some of their words formed the basis of the written record. When a peasant’s will was recorded, he or she was often suffering a last illness, but could still make bequests to be written by the clerk, though the details may have been prompted by the clerk’s suggestions. A manorial account was based on the spoken words of the reeve, an unfree peasant, with the help of aids to memory such as tally sticks. The document was prepared by the clerk using a template. For us to hear the voice of the peasant is not always an effort of imagination, as English phrases were included in the documents when the clerk’s Latin failed him. Cattle grazing illicitly on a common because a peasant had sold his rights to a butcher were called ‘chapman’s wares’. Landmarks in deeds might include ‘a nether hadelond’ or a ‘wateryngplace’. A marriage agreed by mutual consent was called a ‘handfasting’. These glimpses of everyday speech are very satisfying, but almost all written records were Latin texts recording legal processes in conventional formulae. They were written for the lords or the government for particular ends, rarely for the benefit of the peasants, and never to help future historians.

Archaeological evidence appears to give us direct access to the illiterate and underprivileged. If a village, or part of one, is excavated and its surroundings surveyed the houses, fields, material goods (pottery and metalwork) and animal bones and plant remains are laid out before us as they were abandoned by the peasant occupants. Of course the meaning of the surviving data is by no means straightforward. The record is incomplete because organic building materials and artefacts of wood, leather, and cloth have not survived. We cannot be sure how the house was occupied, and we have no information about the status of the tenant or builder. The dates of building and abandonment are based usually on pottery which is often imprecise, and the material from the final phases is mingled with debris from earlier periods. The surrounding landscape has much evidence of boundaries and some for the use of land, but ownership, tenancy, and management are matters for conjecture.

This book is based on a sample of evidence. Every major collection of manuscripts has been visited, and transcripts and notes made, but much has had to be left unread. The largest collection is in Worcester Cathedral Library, which includes a series of court rolls for eighteen of its larger manors for most of the years between 1314 and 1520. All of the rolls for six sample years have been read, and all of the rolls for two manors, Blackwell and Shipston and Cleeve Prior. Many of the other rolls have been used in parts.

A higher proportion of the contents of other archives of manorial records have been transcribed or summarized, but rarely all those surviving for one place or estate. Some public records in print such as the Hundred Rolls, the lay subsidies, the poll taxes, the inquisitions post mortem, and the Valor Ecclesiasticus have been used often, but the voluminous unpublished records of the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas have been barely scratched.

All of the archaeological reports with relevant material—that is, relating to villages and other peasant sites—have been consulted, and also surveys and reports resulting from landscape history projects. The author has done field work, mostly in south Warwickshire, the north Cotswolds, and in parts of woodland Worcestershire.

The purpose of this book is to use as much evidence as possible, hopefully overcoming the many problems of interpretation, in order to answer the central questions about the parts that peasants played in creating, promoting, and resisting change in a representative region between 1200 and 1540.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0001

¹ G.C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1941); R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975); P.D.A. Harvey, ed., The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England (Oxford, 1984); R.M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984); B.A. Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986); J. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000); P.R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200–1500 (Basingstoke, 2003); P.R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians: Debating the Medieval English Peasantry (Manchester, 2016). For continental Europe, see M.M. Postan, ed., The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, 2nd edn, 1966); W. Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985); T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe (Harlow, 1998).

² A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978).

³ P.R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians, pp. 22–3; T. Shanin, ed. Peasants and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 14–17.

⁴ For a useful definition in a European context, see P. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 9–12.

⁵ Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 12–13; F. Ellis, Peasant Economics (Cambridge, 1993); E. Vanhaute, Peasants in World History (London, 2021).

⁶ E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896); R.H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973).

⁷ C.J. Wickham, ‘How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies’, P&P 251 (2021), pp. 3–40.

⁸ R.M. Smith, Land, Kinship and Lifecycle; L.R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); Z. Razi and R.M. Smith, eds., Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996); R.M. Smith, ‘The English Peasantry, 1250–1650’, in T. Scott, ed., Peasantries; c. Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2009).

⁹ J.A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility. Studies in the Social History of the Medieval English Village (Toronto, 1964); E. Britton, The Community of the Vill (Toronto, 1977).

¹⁰ J.M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford, 1987); J.M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England (Oxford, 1996); M.E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, 1998).

¹¹ PJ.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women in York and Yorkshire c.1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); T. de Moor and J.L van Zanden, ‘Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Market in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, EcHR 63 (2010), pp. 1–33.

¹² B. Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East. The Evidence of Tithes, 1270–1536 (Woodbridge, 2007).

¹³ R. Holt, ‘Whose were the Profits of Corn Milling? The Abbots of Glastonbury and their Tenants, 1086–1350’, P&P 116 (1987), pp. 3–23.

¹⁴ D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005), pp. 262–72. P. Slavin, ‘Peasant Livestock Husbandry in Late Thirteenth-Century Suffolk: Economy, Environment and Society’, in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy, edited by M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon, and P.R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 3–26.

¹⁵ B.M.S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’, P&P 188 (2005), pp. 3–70.

¹⁶ H.E. Hallam, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, 2, 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988); E. Miller, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, 3, 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 1991); R.H. Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530 (Oxford, 2004); S.H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003).

¹⁷ C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 383–588.

¹⁸ J.S. Beckerman, ‘Procedural Innovation and Institutional Change in Medieval English Manorial Courts’, Law and History Review 10 (1992), pp. 197–252; L.R. Poos and L. Bonfield, eds., Select Cases in Manorial Courts (Selden Society, 114 (1998).

¹⁹ J. Masschaele, Jury, State and Society in Medieval England (Basingstoke, 2008).

²⁰ R.H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974); L.R. Poos, ed., Lower Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in Late-Medieval England (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 32, 2001).

²¹ A.D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury, 1200–1550 (Oxford, 1995); K.L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval Diocese (Philadelphia, PA, 2001); B. Kumin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996).

²² S. Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994).

²³ S. Kilby, Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape (Hatfield, 2020).

²⁴ C. Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology. Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches (London, 2003), pp. 95–132).

²⁵ N. Christie and P. Stamper, eds., Medieval Rural Settlement. Britain and Ireland, AD 800–1600 (Oxford, 2012); M. Gardiner and S. Rippon, eds., Medieval Landscapes (Macclesfield, 2007); S. Mileson, ‘Openness and Closure in Later Medieval Villages’, P&P 234 (2017), pp. 3–37.

²⁶ R.H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (revised edition, Cambridge, 1983).