3

Peasant society: Landholding and status

Were the social conditions of west midland peasants imposed on them, or could they act to improve or change their circumstances? This chapter will be focussed on themes of inequalities in landholding and legal status, tracing developments throughout the period.

Lords often counted their tenants, or made lists of them, which gives us a picture of a society stratified by the amount of land held and by legally defined tenures and personal status. After a few listings from before 1066, and the comprehensive but brief description of landholding in Domesday Book, more detailed surveys were made by large church estates of their own manors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The state surveyed lands of the laity in the Hundred Rolls of 1279 and the Inquisitions Post Mortem, most informatively between 1250 and 1340. For the rest of the period tenants were listed in rentals, which lacked details.

The surveys show the peasants as subordinates, but modern observers should not accept these partisan documents as an objective depiction of the structure of society. The lords believed that their predecessors had granted land to peasants, and that they continued to be entitled to exercise authority over peasants and to gain a flow of income from them.

An extent (survey) was made in 1299 after the death of John Giffard for his manor of Brimpsfield, in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. ¹ The lord was said to have under his direct control a demesne of 580 acres of arable, with 8 acres of meadow and pasture worth 25s (more than a hundred acres). He would also have had access to common pastures. He was obviously able to produce food for his large household, and generate cash from selling surplus grain, wool, and livestock. He enjoyed the status of being the lord of a large manor, reinforced by its castle and associated deer park. Most of the survey was taken up with details of the fifty-nine tenants, giving their names, landholdings, and obligations to the lord. First came the twenty-eight free tenants, most of whom held quarter-yardlands (about 10 acres each) or half-yardlands (20 acres). Yardlands or virgates were the standard unit of landholding, and normally contained about 30 acres of arable land, but yardlands of at least 40 acres were often found in Gloucestershire. ² Then the fourteen tenants in villeinage were listed (mostly with half-yardlands); the seventeen smallholders were mostly cottagers or held about 3 acres each. The villein tenants held land by the custom of the manor, and their equivalents in other surveys of this period were called customary tenants or serfs (servi). They could be known as neifs or nativi (born serfs) or bondmen. All of these terms described people who were unfree. The lord benefitted from the tenants’ rents, £5 in all from the freeholders, and £2 from the villeins, and from the latter he could call on their labour to do 39 days of ploughing and a thousand days of other work, including cutting and carrying corn in the harvest. Tenants of half-yardlands were very useful to the lord as they each were able to own a plough, harrow, and cart and the draught animals to pull them, so they could contribute to the cultivation of the demesne. Much of the agricultural work that was not being done by the tenants in villeinage was carried out by hired labour, and it was convenient for the lord that there were so many smallholders who needed paid work to supplement their income from the land. In practice, the lord is likely to have chosen to take cash rents rather than labour from the customary tenants, and therefore to employ the smallholders as specialists such as shepherds, and as labourers. ³

The information about Brimpsfield came originally from manorial officials, who would have consulted local juries of tenants. The voice of the tenants can sometimes be detected when they specified details favourable to themselves. At Brimpsfield the description of the labour services stated that work would not be done for the lord on saints’ feast days, and that on Saturdays, work should cease at noon. A jury assisting in a survey of another Cotswold manor at Blockley (also in 1299), reported that a tenant of a yardland, John son of William, was supposed to pay a toll when he sold an ox or horse, but he was able to persuade the jury that this applied only to an ox: ‘And he does not owe toll for his horse, as they say’ ⁴ (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 Gloucestershire. A selection of places named.

The details of tenants’ obligations were evidently subject to negotiation and compromise, revealing that tenants took a stance and had some influence at least in small matters. ⁵ On the larger issue of the ordering of society for the benefit of lords, the peasants surely had an alternative model. Judging from the decisions that they were able to make in the manor court about the inheritance of land, they treated their holdings as if they were their property. Their everyday relations with their neighbours, as part of a village community and as parishioners, must have been more important to them than being appendages of a manor serving a lord.

Holding land before 1349

The amount of land held by each tenant was regarded as an important element in defining social rank. In the period 1200–1348 in those districts where landholding was measured in yardlands or virgates, a small minority held more than a yardland (30–40 acres). In most villages, yardlanders occupied the highest rung of the social hierarchy, but as we have seen at Brimpsfield, the half-yardland tenants could form the top layer. Yardlanders were most numerous in the south and east of the region, especially on the Cotswolds and in part of the Vale, and also in the Avon valley and in a scatter of manors in the Feldon of Warwickshire. Half and quarter yardlands are often found in the Worcestershire woodlands and the Arden but in these areas holdings tended not to be measured in yardlands but in acres, or a holding was said to consist of ‘a messuage and an assart’, or ‘a messuage and three crofts’. Smallholdings (mostly between 1 acre and 5 acres) were quite scarce in the Cotswolds, but numerous in woodlands, reaching 62 per cent of the holdings in Warwickshire recorded in 1279 in a cluster of villages in the Arden. Some of these, such as Coundon, were close to Coventry, and proximity to other large towns such as Gloucester and Worcester encouraged the proliferation of smallholdings ⁶ (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Warwickshire. A selection of places named.

A good case can be made for regarding yardlands and their subdivisions, together with smaller holdings called Mondaylands and averclands as designed by lords for their own benefit. According to a pre-Conquest document depicting peasant obligations, The Rules of all Kinds of People, lords endowed tenants with yardlands, and provided them with livestock and equipment, which enabled them to pay rents and do substantial labour services. The cottars or smallholders would do general labouring tasks. ⁷

Lords in the later Middle Ages maintained a policy of preserving the integrity of the standard holdings. This was partly for clarity in levying rents and services on a well-defined unit of tenure, as records of landholding enabled the lord to keep track of the lands and tenants. It was also in the lord’s interest that holdings should not be excessively fragmented. The half-yardlanders of Brimpsfield would have four oxen (a number which suggests an unusually large half-yardland), which could be yoked together with the oxen of a neighbour to form the ideal eight-ox plough team for tilling the demesne (see ‘Cattle’ in Chapter 7). The yardlanders’ and half-yardlanders’ ability to cultivate their own holdings was also to the lord’s advantage as their produce fed the peasants’ families, but part would be sold, enabling rents in cash to be paid.

The lord’s interests were also served by having a number of smallholdings from which labour could be recruited. At Brimpsfield John Gilebert held a Mondayland, a holding of about 3 acres, for which he was obliged to work on Mondays. The lord would find that day’s work useful, but on the other days John would be available to take paid work. There were six other Mondaymen at Brimpsfield, and ten cottagers, so the lord had a plentiful supply of labour for weeding, harvesting, threshing, and mending the fence round the park.

The lords kept the standard holdings intact by prohibiting, or only allowing under licence, the splitting of the inheritance between heirs, or the subletting of parcels of land; or the sale by the tenant of part of the holding. In view of the rules that the lords imposed, could peasants have much influence over the possession and transfer of land? In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries everyone involved in decisions about land was under some pressure arising from the growth in population, and the commercial expansion, which together created a greater demand for land and its produce. ⁸ These underlying tendencies were expressed at local level by the concern of families to provide for younger sons and daughters who were excluded from the main inheritance. They provided the energy behind the movement to create new holdings, either from the demesne, or from clearing land from woods and pastures, or by division of tenures.

Tenants could achieve some of their ambitions for non-inheriting relatives. On some manors, yardlands appear to have been plentiful in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and were subsequently divided. The process can be observed on the Worcestershire manor of Ripple, where in about 1170 there were fourteen full yardlands, but by 1299 only one survived, alongside sixty-two half-yardlands. Twenty-four yardland holdings had already been divided by 1170, and the origin of the other half-yardlands can be detected in a number of statements that two tenants held a yardland together ⁹ (Figure 3.3). Partible inheritance between brothers or other close relatives can be suggested by identifications of joint tenants as in 1279 at Wasperton (Warwickshire) where Laurence Norman and Robert Norman were named as tenants of a yardland. In three other cases the second tenant lacks a surname, for example, ‘William le Bachiler and Sarra’, which may well be indicating two members of the same family. The process is recorded at Cleeve Prior at the rather late date of 1351, when Thomas de Yardley, who was ‘poor and disabled’, surrendered his rights to a yardland to his brother and sister, each of them to hold a half. ¹⁰ Lords would also have hoped to increase rents by multiplying tenants, so the interests of both peasants and lords seem to have been converging.

Figure 3.3 Worcestershire. A selection of places named.

The subdivisions stopped at a point when both lords and peasants probably realized the dangers of taking the process too far. At Ripple in 1299 three half-yardlands were held jointly by two tenants, and therefore heading towards division. ¹¹ However, though the process had begun in that village, it did not continue. Perhaps the lord doubted if tenants of quarter-yardlands would easily pay rents and do services, and peasants understood that such a holding on its own could not sustain a family. In Warwickshire in 1357, it was assumed that tenants of quarter-yardlands would normally work for wages. ¹²

There were many other ways that the apparently rigid structure of standard landholdings could be adapted to the requirements of peasant life cycles. A temporary subdivision could be part of a retirement agreement. The retired couple, or widow or widower, were usually assigned a space in which to live and a promise of food. They were sometimes allowed a part of the land, such as a house and one acre for William Walter of Pensax (Worcestershire) in 1315, who was said to be ‘destitute and decayed’. A widow of Tibberton in the same county in 1316 drove a hard bargain and was assigned a small house, 4 acres of land, and an acre of meadow from a half-yardland, so about a quarter of the holding. ¹³ The arrangement did not threaten the main holding in the long term because the land would revert when the old person died.

A special feature of the landholding customs on the Halesowen estate, which might have been a quirk of record-keeping rather than a radical departure from normal practice, was the granting of a parcel of land to relatives such as non-inheriting children. For example, in 1302 a tenant of Romsley gave his brother John son of Mall and Margery his wife a butt of land on which to build, to hold for life for 1 ½d per annum. ¹⁴ Such a grant enabled the building of a cottage so that those without an inheritance could set up an independent household. The lord licensed these arrangements, but the initiatives came from the peasants.

The short-term division of holdings was also a feature of customary inheritance in relation to widows and their rights of dower. This was a commonplace among free tenants, which is often not fully recorded, but in the Worcestershire manor of Wolverley widows of customary holdings were entitled to dower. Normally widows were allowed free bench of her husband’s customary holding, that is to keep the land for life providing that she did not remarry and was not ‘corrupted’ by extra-marital sexual relations. At Wolverley a widow retained half of the holding in her lifetime. The way this worked is demonstrated by a dispute in 1346 over holdings which had belonged to Roger de Blakesole. The two holdings, a messuage and a half-yardland and a messuage and a quarter-yardland, were claimed by Robert Hobekins. His claim was upheld, but half of the land was being retained as dower by Roger’s widow, Matilda. She could not manage the cultivation herself, so she obtained a licence from the lord to lease the land to Richard Hereward. She received in return an annual allowance of grain and so was protected from penury. The danger for the lord was that the half shares might be transferred to new tenants, delaying or preventing the ultimate reuniting of the holding. In this case, in the next year Robert Hobekins surrendered the land to his daughter, also called Matilda, and she married Hereward the subtenant which enabled him to take over all of the land. ¹⁵ This custom of dower is unlikely to have been proposed by the lord: he was bending to a well-established tradition among the tenants.

Turning to the numerous holdings in free tenure, these are not fully recorded in manorial courts because lords had limited authority over them. However free land was liable to payment of heriot at the end of a tenancy. New tenants were expected to pay a relief (fixed at one year’s rent rather than a variable entry fine), and to do fealty. These obligations were overseen by the manorial court, so that transfers of freeholdings were recorded on the court roll. An alternative guide to the land dealings of free tenants comes from deeds, which throw light on the fragmentation of holdings. Two collections of deeds, from Hanley Castle in Worcestershire and Coleshill in Warwickshire, are analysed in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Transfers of free land in deeds

Tenants presumably reduced the size of their holdings because they had to sell land to pay debts or because of the stage that they had reached in the life cycle. Land was acquired at the beginning of a landholding career, or to expand the productive capacity of a holding, or to provide for offspring who could not inherit the main holding. Grants by and to lords have been excluded from the sample, to enable a focus on transfers among peasants. The majority of transfers were apparently between unrelated people, that is, 83 per cent at Hanley and 69 per cent at Coleshill. The very large numbers of transfers of parcels—mostly selions or odd acres in the open fields, or crofts which were numerous in these woodland manors—might suggest that the standard holdings were breaking down into fragments under the pressure of inheritance and the land market, but many tenements survived. Free tenants (and their customary neighbours who also acquired free land) took advantage of the flexibility of gaining and disposing of parcels of land and crofts as they were needed, but they valued their yardlands and half-yardlands, either to be inherited, or to be sold at a good price. ¹⁶

A more comprehensive picture of sub-division by free tenants comes from the Hundred Rolls of 1279 which record tenures for 122 villages in east Warwickshire. The surveys are ideal for investigating free peasants’ dealings in land, as lords were not directing the activities of these relatively independent landholders. Land was clearly sublet on a large scale. On the woodland estate of Stoneleigh of 1,650 acres held by tenants, 471 acres or 28.5 per cent were recorded as being in the hands of subtenants. In the champion village of Priors Hardwick, from at least 700 acres of tenanted land, 122 ½ acres, or 17.5 per cent, were sublet. ¹⁷

Subletting is important for this study because it shows how tenants could add to, or subtract from, or in some other way manipulate the holdings which appear in the official record. ¹⁸ The subtenants may have been the people who were involved in agricultural production, including people who were apparently landless, while those said to be tenants were just drawing a rent. At Stoneleigh thirty-five of the fifty subtenants were not also named as tenants, so potentially they gained access to land held officially by others. However some of them were tenants in nearby villages, and one of them served as a juror for compiling the Hundred Rolls and must have been propertied. Six of the subtenants were also letting out land. We find people renting land both from the lord of the manor, and fellow tenants, and then choosing part of their accumulation of land to sublet to others. The whole complex web of tenancy and subtenancy does not present us with a clear alternative pattern of landholding. Among Stoneleigh tenants (excluding subtenants) 60 per cent held 4 acres or less; if tenants and subtenants are added together the percentage of smallholders remains the same.

Was subletting a means by which a tenant could gain a good income from the rents paid by the subtenants? Only occasionally does the rent seem really profitable, like the 10s and 4 horse shoes paid for a half-yardland at Milverton, so in excess of 8d per acre. ¹⁹ Subletting could have yielded labour rather than money, for example two tenants of free yardlands at Bishops Tachbrook had cottars as subtenants, who could have been expected to work, not for the lord of the manor, but for a tenant. ²⁰ A non-economic motive would be to help relatives gain a toehold on a holding, like the cottages already noted as being squeezed onto a messuage for a younger son or daughter who was not able to inherit. So Cristiana de Merehule of Lighthorne rented a cottage from a relative, perhaps her father, for 14d. ²¹

The subtenants could transform their lives by acquiring access to land, like Reginald de Wolvey of Sowe (now called Walsgrave) who rented a messuage from one tenant and 1½ acres from another. He had the basis for forming his own household, and in feeding his family he was not entirely dependent on wages. There were also opportunities for those at the upper end of the peasantry, like Richard le Bedel of Priors Marston, who managed to accumulate 70 acres by combining tenanted and subtenanted holdings. ²² Of course, sublet land was not held by secure tenure, so it was not an unqualified advantage.

As subletting potentially undermined a lord’s control of customary land it was not allowed without a licence. Because permission was not always sought, we cannot make an accurate assessment of the quantity of land involved, though the steady stream of reports of illicit subletting raises our suspicion that much went undiscovered and unreported. A note added to the 1299 survey of Bishop’s Cleeve (Gloucestershire) reveals a type of subtenant: ‘there are many male cottars who owe the lord a one day bedrip (reaping service), and their wives do nothing’, meaning that the wives had no obligation to the lord. ²³ These smallholders presumably owed rent to the tenants from whom they held their cottages, perhaps in the form of work. A list at Eldersfield (Worcestershire) in 1317 contains thirty-five names of people (twelve of them women) who did three bedrips for the lord, a common service required of the landless. ²⁴ A number of them seem to have the same name as tenants, so they were presumably related, and others were said to have been earning wages, but their obligation to work suggests that they were not living in the parental household, and some of them are likely to have been subletting cottages.

The cottars and ‘little cottars’ (cotterelli) on some Worcester Cathedral Priory manors were not listed by name but their numbers were given. Two or three appear on some manors in 1314–18, attracting attention at a time of bad harvests, but in 1336–7 a campaign was mounted by the Priory administration to uncover the hidden cottars. Ten tenants each from the manors of Cleeve Prior, Crowle, and Sedgeberrow were all presented for having cottars ‘under them’, with one, two, or three cottars each, making a total at Crowle of sixteen coterelli. ²⁵ The Priory was troubled by subletting without permission, and also because subtenants were believed to be unruly. In 1316 two Cleeve Prior cottars were accused of harbouring malefactors, and a Cropthorne cottar was said in 1318 to have carried off sheaves from the harvest field. ²⁶ However cottars had considerable value to the better-off villagers as a source of labour, and sublets to cottars must have been the secret practice in many villages. Renting out a small parcel for a cottage to be built was not regarded as a heinous crime, judging from the amercements of only 2d levied on offenders. Lords were being tolerant of peasants who for a combination of motives, including accommodating family members as well as increasing the pool of labour, were altering the formal structure of landholding. Of course, these cottages were much in demand from the considerable number of those lacking a secure income, and unable to acquire conventional holdings.

The subletting of land for cultivation rather than as building plots was probably on a much larger scale than the proliferation of unofficial cottage holdings. When the authorities investigated subletting, as happened on the Worcester Priory manors of Himbleton (Worcestershire) and Blackwell (Warwickshire) in 1315–16, enough cases were revealed to suggest that many hundreds of acres were being sublet at any time on the whole estate. ²⁷ Most presentments of offenders gave few details, but enough did mention the acreage of the land granted, the rent paid, and the length of the subletting contract. Table 3.2 is based on the subletting arrangements known from the Worcester Priory estate.

Table 3.2 Subletting arrangements on Worcester Priory manors before 1349

The generalization that a high proportion of sublets resulted in a few acres of land being held for a short time, four years or less, is reinforced by the suspicion that lettings of very small parcels for a year were disregarded and escaped notice. Nonetheless, some holdings were half-yardlands or above that size, and could be sublet for more than ten years or even for life. On the Halesowen estate in the early fourteenth century, land was being let for even longer terms of twelve to sixteen years, suggesting that some tenancies of sublet lands were lasting as long as those of conventional holdings. ²⁸

Customary land could be the subject of complex arrangements, for example when three tiers of tenants were involved. At Alveston (Warwickshire) in 1326 Thomas de Clyve’s half-yardland had come into the hands of Adam de Styvyngton, who in turn let it to Thomas Lewelyn for sixteen years. ²⁹ To satisfy the lord’s qualms, when a sublet was registered in the manor court the tenant and subtenant could agree about their obligations to the lord. Often the lessor was responsible for rents, but in the second quarter of the fourteenth century the subtenant occasionally took on more responsibilities, even to maintain the buildings. The lessors apparently gained a considerable benefit from a sublet, because they were willing to pay sizeable sums to the lord for a licence, in the range of 2s, 3s 4d, and even 6s 8d. The rent the subtenant paid is rarely recorded, except that in many cases a champart contract was arranged, by which the lessor took a third (or rarely a half) of the crops.

Subletting was not just a matter of transferring control of land and its profits from lord to tenant, and therefore modifying the formal structure of standard tenements, but was a convenient way of managing the various social needs in the peasant community. Land could be sublet to a person holding custody of a child, on condition that the land would revert to the heir when he came of age. Subletting could also offer at least a temporary solution of the problem of non-inheriting children, as when at Newnham (Worcestershire) in 1325 the heir to a yardland sublet half of the holding to his brother. Subletting also came to the aid of tenants who for various reasons could not manage the land themselves. In 1346 John Rolf of Himbleton sublet his land for twelve years because he was disabled, and the new subtenant, William Trigg, paid John’s entry fine of 40s (for a quarter-yardland) and agreed to maintain the buildings and land. ³⁰ In the same year Peter de Hardenhull at Hallow in 1346 was reported to be in debt, and sublet his land for seven years, presumably to enable his creditor to recover the money owed. Such a case opens the possibility that undocumented credit negotiations lay behind sublets. Widows also found subletting a convenient way of gaining an income from the land that they held in free bench, so Edward le Newe at Boraston in Newnham (Worcestershire) in 1315 was given a licence to cultivate the land of Edith, widow of Adam Blowe, for 3½ years. ³¹ Women could also be lessees, as when a holding at Lindridge (Worcestershire) was taken for six years by Cristina atte Nassch and Cristina Haukenes. This was in 1315, a year when a bad harvest made land and grain especially desirable. The lessor was to receive half of the grain, and he would pay the lord’s (cash) rent and contributed to the 5s fee for the licence to sublet. ³²

The opportunity that subletting provided the smallholders and other less privileged members of peasant society should not be exaggerated, and those receiving holdings could be from the wealthier end of village society. So we find at Romsley (Worcestershire) that members of three leading families, Henry de Fulfen, William de Yildentre, and Thomas Squier acquired land by licensed subletting in the period 1280–1322. ³³

Our conclusion must be that subletting, both of free and customary land, reveals the ingenuity that peasants applied to mould the apparently rigid landholding structures to meet their needs. There were risks for the tenants as well as the lord in the informality of the arrangements, as experienced by a widow of Overbury in 1315 who wished to recover 6 ½ acres of land sublet by her former husband without licence. ³⁴

Changing circumstances: Entry fines

A dramatic fall in population changed the circumstances and dynamics of peasant life in the fourteenth century. The underlying influences on the new pattern of landholding, working, and social interaction have been often told and do not need elaborate documentation here. There were problems of high mortality which brought population growth to an end in the first half of the fourteenth century. The Great Famine of 1315–17 was linked with increased death rates, cattle disease, and lasting agrarian problems throughout the region. ³⁵ These problems were invoked by those collecting the new tax of a ninth in 1341, who reported that in some Gloucestershire villages families were abandoning the land and leaving many acres untilled. A few Cotswold settlements were left virtually uninhabited at this time, such as Little Aston in Aston Blank; and nearby Eyford had only one taxpaying household in 1327. ³⁶ The plague epidemic that reached the region at the end of 1348 and spread in 1349 is calculated to have killed about 43 per cent of the male population of the manor of Halesowen. A guide to mortality among tenants of the estates of the bishopric of Worcester comes from the 44 per cent holdings left vacant after the event, and institutions of new clergy in the diocese of Worcester to replace those who had died amounted to 44.5 per cent. ³⁷ All of these figures are based on imperfect data, and it may well be that mortality in the region, taking into account the bias of our sample towards relatively healthy adult males, exceeded 50 per cent. Succeeding epidemics of plague in 1361 and 1369, and of plague and other diseases in the fifteenth century, together with changes in marriage and fertility for which there is little direct documentation, kept the numbers of peasants at a low level until well after 1500. This demographic episode is important background, but as we shall see, peasants were not the prisoners of their circumstances, and they were subject to a wide range of influences including the pursuit of their own aspirations.

An overview of trends in peasant landholding in the long term can be gained from the payment of entry fines. These charges on a tenant taking on a new holding could be profitable for lords, and for tenants represented a major investment. The sums that they were prepared to pay guide us in judging the availability of land, the profits it might give, the strength of peasant ambition, and the fierceness of competition between would-be landholders. The intending tenant would sometimes be paying a price to the seller, but this transaction is hardly ever recorded, so the entry fine is the best guide we have to land values. In deciding the purchase price and the amount of the entry fine such factors as commodity prices, wage costs, and the availability of credit would enter into the calculation. There were also non-economic considerations, such as attachment to family land, and concern for the welfare of relatives. In our own times the future enters into our calculations, and to some extent this was also the case in the Middle Ages, but their future was even more unpredictable than ours. The policy of the lords had an influence, for example when they balanced annual rents against fines, and required a modest fine for a holding of which the rent reflected its ‘true value’.

The fines provide an indirect guide to the varied demand for land, which in its broad outlines follows a predictable path. Fines were high in the period 1270–1349, fell to a varied extent in the late fourteenth century, reached a low level in the fifteenth century, and in some places picked up around 1500. Fines can be measured in terms of the amount of money per yardland or per acre, so that a standard high fine before 1349 was 10 marks per yardland, which could be expressed as £6 13s 4d, but people tended to think in marks. Ten marks would have been the benchmark around which the tenant and the estate officials would have negotiated, especially on some manors south of the Avon, such as Sedgeberrow (Worcestershire) and Blackwell (Warwickshire). The rate of fine for individual holdings rose well above the 10 mark level, up to £8, £10, £12, and £14 per yardland. In fact, the highest recorded rate of fine, £4 16s 8d for a quarter-yardland, equivalent to £19 6s 8d per yardland, was paid in 1314 for a holding at Shoulton in Hallow to the north of Worcester. ³⁸ The high price presumably reflected the proximity of the city. On the estate of Winchcomb Abbey, for example at Long Marston (Warwickshire) in the lowland champion country south of the Avon, not far from Blackwell and Sedgeberrow, a fine of 10 marks per yardland (in fact 20 marks for two yardlands) can be found in the 1340s. The equivalent of 12 marks per yardland (6 marks for a half-yardland) was charged on the Cotswold edge at Stanton (Gloucestershire). A yardland at Kempsford (a Cotswold manor on a lay estate) cost £6 13s 4d for a yardland in 1310, and a tenant of the lay lord of Badminton on the south-eastern fringes of the Gloucestershire Cotwolds was prepared to pay £4 6s 8d for a half-yardland, that is at a rate of 13 marks per yardland. ³⁹ On manors with few or no yardlands, the fine has to be calculated per acre. At Eldersfield in the woodlands west of the Severn the fines commonly amounted to 12d per acre before 1349, equivalent to 30s per yardland, and from 1360–99 wavered between 4d and 8d, comparable with a fine of 10s−20s per yardland. ⁴⁰ Perhaps the tenants did not rate the quality of the land very highly, but after the plague they were prepared to pay more than their contemporaries did on the Worcester Priory manors.

No consistent picture emerges of the period immediately before 1349, with a concentration of hard luck stories in the high Cotswolds, with some low entry fines, vacant holdings, and neglected buildings. ⁴¹ On some parts of the wolds, and in the lowlands more widely, tenants in the ten years before 1349 seem to have been approaching their acquisition of land with confidence and optimism.

After 1349 our sample manors (Table 3.3) differ considerably with Cleeve Prior fines between 1350 and 1400 being reduced to a token payment of poultry, which had a cash value of 12d at most. After 1400 those acquiring land recovered sufficient confidence to pay at least a few shillings as fines, and a revival in demand is apparent in the 1490s. The peasants of Blackwell and Shipston, perhaps feeling the beneficial influence of their small town, in the fifteenth century tended to offer a single mark, 13s 4d per yardland, apart from reductions in the 1430s and 1440s.

Table 3.3 Entry fines on two Worcester Priory manors, 1310–1520 (median rates of fine, per yardland)

	Blackwell/Shipston *	Cleeve Prior
1310–19	£6 13s 4d	£3 15s 0d
1320–9	£3	£5 3s 4d
1330–9	–	£4 2s 0d
1340–9	£9 10s 0d	£6 13s 4d
1350–9	13s 4d	0
1360–9	£1 6s 8d	12 capons
1370–9	3s 4d	6 capons
1380–9	7s 8d	6 capons
1390–9	10s	4 capons
1400–9	£1 6s 8d	6s 8d
1410–19	3s 4d	0
1420–9	13s 4d	3 capons
1430–9	0	6s 9d
1440–9	3 capons	3s 4d
1450–9	13s 4d	3s 4d
1460–9	£1 0s 0d	16 capons
1470–9	11s 5d	–
1480–9	16s 0d	3s 4d
1490–9	5s 0d	15s 8d
1500–9	13s 4d	6s 0d
1510–19	13s 4d	–

*The rural holdings only, excluding fines paid for holdings in the borough of Shipston.

Source: WCL, E1–E95

On the Winchcomb Abbey estate, the median fine fell from £2 per yardland in the 1340s to 10s in the 1360s, but then it declined continuously from 2s or 3s around 1400 until between 1440 and 1469 token payments of poultry predominated. Over the whole region tenants were in general paying no more than 13s 4d., and often much smaller sums at the end of the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth, reflecting the modest rewards of cultivation.

We cannot be sure that lords were always effective negotiators, and this could be reflected in reduced fines when some assertive tenants may have faced down the lord’s officials. Lords also exercised patronage and allowed favoured tenants to gain land cheaply. At Ombersley in north Worcestershire, an outlier of the Evesham Abbey estate, fines reached low levels after 1380, and there was no marked revival even after 1500. ⁴² In the 1470s and 1480s the tenants were systematically depriving the lord of heriot payments, which the abbey’s officials seemed to accept, so perhaps they did not drive a hard bargain either on entry fines. The demand for land at Ombersley was probably quite high, suggested by much subletting, and absentee tenants apparently regarded Ombersley holdings as good investments. The soil was high in quality, and there were easy connections to urban markets.

Perhaps low entry fines, if they resulted from institutional weakness, give us an exaggerated impression of the poor returns from cultivation. However, fifteenth-century fines could reflect the market, as in some parts of the region rising rates of fine suggest increased agrarian profits. The people who lived in villages around Bristol were clearly responding to the commercial stimulus. At Stoke Gifford the median fines in the 1420s and 1450s, £2 and £1 6s 8d were considerably higher than any of the places reviewed so far, and they rose decisively to £4 8s 0d and then £7 between 1488 and 1510. Nearby on the Severn estuary, peasants at Rockhampton were paying £4–5 for a yardland for most of the fifteenth century, rising to £8 in 1506–9. ⁴³ A figure of £8 was reached at Henbury-in-the-Salt-Marsh by the 1530s, after a rising trend since the 1460s. Near to the city of Worcester, which was growing in size towards the end of the Middle Ages, tenants were also paying higher fines after 1470 and especially after 1500, up to £4–5. ⁴⁴ Rural industry may have helped to lift the level of fine that new tenants were prepared to pay, with more than £1 per yardland in and near the clothing district of Bisley during the fifteenth century. At Horsley in the 1470s the rate of fine reached £2–4 per yardland, and fines as high as £2 were needed to obtain cottages, presumably because they attracted textile workers. ⁴⁵

To sum up, entry fines were an imposition on the peasantry and lords could gain considerable profit from them. If peasants wanted land, they had to pay fines, just as they had to find a purchase price for the sitting tenant. The high fines before 1349 must have saddled buyers and their families with large debts, but a significant number were able to pay the sum required. Land was much more easily obtained after 1349, and especially after 1400, reflecting the reduced income from farming. There were exceptions to the overall story of declining land values, notably the suspicion that some tenants were being given an easy time by slack officials, but also that in some places and at some times, notably around 1500 in south Gloucestershire and near Worcester, land was giving better returns, and tenants could pay higher fines and also gain a good living.

Landholding 1349–1540

After 1349, just as in the pre-plague era, peasant could make choices and influence the acquisition and inheritance of land. No law of nature determined that if there were fewer people and the same amount of land, that holdings should increase in size. Tenants had to make a decision to acquire land, and they made their choices in complex situations. Vacant holdings ‘lay in the lord’s hands’ and the lord’s officials judged the capacity of would-be tenants. The tenants themselves had to consider whether they had the necessary equipment and livestock, or enough money to pay for these and also building repairs. They might expect support from their families, and from the wider community, some of whom would act as pledges (guaranteeing rents and building repairs). Much depended on judgements about local conditions, which varied with landscapes, soils, and markets.

The long-term consequences of the decisions made by dozens of individuals resulted in new distributions of land, which are reflected in surveys compiled before and after 1349. Without systematic evidence for subletting arrangements, we rely on the official records of tenancy. No two places experienced the same changes, but broad patterns can be noted. In some cases a drastic fall in numbers was associated with the growth of very large holdings. Priors Hardwick (Warwickshire) in 1279 had forty-two tenants, almost half with half-yardlands. By 1411 the tenants were reduced to sixteen, including four with two yardlands or above. A similarly impressive amalgamation of holdings is found at Wasperton (Warwickshire), where in 1279 twenty-eight of the thirty-four tenants held half-yardlands, but in 1411 of the twenty-one tenants, twelve held more than a yardland, and seven of them each had three yardlands. ⁴⁶ The size of the median holding had risen from 15 acres to 60 acres. Similar concentrations of land in the hands of tenants, with two or three yardland holdings appearing in growing numbers, were a feature of the champion villages of all three counties, and the same trend is apparent in the Cotswolds.

Tenants took on large holdings already in existence, or built up accumulations of land by a series of separate transactions because they had the resources to acquire and manage such a holding. However, when a peasant whose grandfather cultivated a half-yardland took on three yardlands, he was not six times more wealthy than his predecessor. A 90-acre holding cultivated on a two-course rotation would require 270 days of ploughing (at a half-acre in a day), and therefore the employment of extra labour. Harvesting and other seasonal tasks would add to the wages bill. After 1375 a smaller area would be ploughed as grain prices fell, and more animals, especially sheep, would be kept on those parts of the field system where grass grew. As sheep numbers were fixed by a stint for each yardland, a three-yardland tenant would be able to keep a flock of at least ninety and possibly 180, depending on the rules in each village.

Priors Hardwick and Wasperton had few smallholders in the late thirteenth century, and the numbers remained low. In many champion villages, while more large holdings were formed, smallholdings shrank drastically in number. Evidently the sons and daughters of cottagers were losing interest in living on a few acres combined with earnings from wages or the profits of a craft. At Priors Marston, the adjoining village to Hardwick, sixty-eight tenants in 1279, more than half of the total, held below a half-yardland, while in 1411 there were five in that category. ⁴⁷ At Cleeve Prior, a champion village in Worcestershire, there had been eighteen smallholders from fifty-four tenants in 1310, but only one in 1502, among a grand total of seventeen tenants, most of them holding more than a yardland. ⁴⁸

The rise of large holdings and the decline in cottagers have been depicted, but sometimes smallholdings survived, and the tenants of middling holdings diminished in number. At the champion village of Ufton (Warwickshire) in the thirteenth century, the twenty-six half-yardlands accounted for a majority among forty-three tenants. By 1411 the half-yardlands had ceased to exist; the number of those with 10 acres or less had fallen to six, and there were nineteen with a yardland or larger holding (see Figure 2.8). The Honington smallholders declined from sixteen to seven in 1279–1411, and only three half-yardlands (compared with eighteen in the thirteenth century) separated the smallholders from the twenty-eight yardlands and double yardlands of 1411. ⁴⁹ In general the half-yardlander, a very commonly encountered tenant in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, had become a scarce species by the fifteenth century. Potential tenants found half-yardlands unattractive because on their own they provided an adequate subsistence but at best a modest surplus. Tenants increasingly used half-yardlands as building blocks in constructing larger accumulations.

In the woodlands smallholdings had been very prominent before 1349, and afterwards they persisted. On the huge Stoneleigh manor in the Arden smallholders were reduced, but in 1392 tenants with 7 acres or less still accounted for 46 per cent of the total. ⁵⁰ Walsgrave on Sowe (Warwickshire) in a woodland landscape but also on the edge of Coventry, declined in size while its urban neighbour expanded, but holdings below 5 acres still made up a good proportion of the total (28 per cent—it had once been 53 per cent). There was no great increase in large holdings. Counting all of the holdings on Coventry Priory’s suburban manors shows tenants with 7 acres and below fell from 48 per cent to 38 per cent. ⁵¹ Presumably smallholdings remained attractive in the new post-1349 world for the same reasons that they were a viable basis for a family’s survival in the thirteenth century. The tenant’s living was built on a combination of an acre or two, access to large commons and woods, the availability of employment in both farming and industry, and the opportunities of work either in or near to the town.

Lords could contribute to the amount of land available to peasants by grants of waste (mostly in the thirteenth century) or parcels of demesne in all periods but in large quantities after about 1380. The lords’ main role was to supervise through the manor court the transfer of customary land, ensuring that it descended after death or surrender by inheritance according to custom. This included arranging for widows to take their husband’s land as their free bench. Land for which there was no heir came into ‘the lord’s hands’, and he would then expect to grant it to a suitable tenant. A tenant could surrender land into the lord’s hands, but would declare that it was for the use of another party (the key phrase was that a grant was being made ad opus). This would normally mean the surrendering tenant had sold the land and the lord would grant it to the buyer, keeping a record of the new tenant, and receiving an entry fine.

Peasants had considerable influence over the descent of land, and the lord had limited opportunities to choose his own tenants. He could sometimes discriminate in favour of tenants he preferred when a vacant holding was being granted. He could also evict tenants, or rather using the formal phraseology, tenants could forfeit the holding by failing to pay their rent, or observe rules about cultivation, building repair, and good behaviour. Forfeiture was threatened more often than it was practised. Lords dealing with unsatisfactory tenants, whose offence was most often (especially after 1349) a failure to repair buildings, threatened them first with financial penalties, and with forfeiture as a last resort. Holdings were sometimes forfeit only after the tenant had left the land, like Richard Tederyngton of Stoke in Hawkesbury (Gloucestershire), who in 1435 withdrew from his cottage and cotland ‘with all of his goods and chattels in the night, of which nothing came to the lord as heriot’. He had owned a cow worth 5s which should have been the heriot, but he must have driven it before him as he made his escape down dark Cotswold lanes. ⁵²

Tenants could manipulate the transfer of land, and the motives behind their actions can sometimes be gleaned from the court records. John Clerk was one of the most substantial tenants in Cleeve Prior in 1386. He arrived in the village in 1351, taking over a substantial holding of land left vacant by the epidemic, and serving (at an early age) as one of the harvest reeves. By 1386 when he died, he had accumulated two yardlands and a half-yardland. A court held in October 1386 heard that one yardland had yielded the lord’s heriot, an ox worth 14s. The court seems to have expected that his widow, Agnes, would claim the yardland as her free bench, but ‘she refused all her right entirely’. It was revealed that ‘in her own right’ from before her marriage she had inherited from her father a yardland and a half, which shows that John Clerk had expanded his holding by marrying an heiress. Agnes retained her rights to the land and claimed therefore that no heriot was due. Scrutiny of the rolls by court officials found a reference to her land ‘six or seven years after the pestilence’, so in about 1356. A few months after her husband’s death the widow reappeared in court to resolve the heriot problem, under the name Agnes Wille, so she had evidently remarried, perhaps to John Wille, a yardlander since 1380. The subsequent stages of the story are not known, but land once held by the Clerks subsequently came into the hands of William atte Grene and William Carles, who were not identified as relatives. John Wille retired in 1406 and was succeeded by his son, also John Wille. ⁵³

This history of a married couple and their lands reveal some typical features of the post-plague era, with the rise of a large holding, and its dissolution. Agnes departed from convention by rejecting her free bench, but she had no need of that restricted benefit because she had her own inheritance. She then followed the traditional path for a widow, by remarrying without delay. The Wille holding was inherited, but other lands seem to have been transferred between non-relatives. In this whole fifty-year saga of a family’s land changing hands, there were four transfers which apparently did not involve inheritance, and only two cases of inheritance.

The conventional means of acquiring land was by inheritance after the death of both parents, or when both parents or a survivor surrendered the land to the heir, often in order to retire. A widow’s free bench gave her the tenure of the holding for life, providing that she did not enter into sexual relations, or remarry. After her death or withdrawal, the land would descend by hereditary succession, normally to the eldest son, or in the absence of sons or daughters to another relative. Hereditary succession was taken very seriously; for example, at Thornbury each vacant holding was publicly proclaimed three times in successive courts, to ensure that heirs could make a claim. In all manors, in the event that rival claimants came forward, the jury in the manor court judged who had the right to take the land, though the lord might influence the decision.

The changing importance of inheritance can be assessed by analysing the transfers of land recorded in the manor court rolls. Many transactions involved land going into, or coming from, the hands of the lord. If we set these aside we can concentrate on land passing between one tenant and another, and these are indicated for a sample of records from the Worcester Priory estate in Table 3.4, which includes inheritance after death and surrenders by tenants in favour or others, distinguishing (as much as is possible) between tenants related to one another and those belonging to different families.

Table 3.4 Transfers of land between tenants on the Worcester Cathedral Priory estate, 1300–1500, comparing those within families and between families

Before 1349 almost two-thirds of the inter-tenant transfers involved identifiable family members. The family’s role in the transmission of land diminished after the epidemics, and remained at below a half of the total until the late fifteenth century when there are signs of a recovery in inheritance. If we divide the manors in the champion country from those located in the woodlands of north and west Worcestershire, except in the half-century after the Black Death transfers between family members were more frequent in the woodland manors. Land in the woodlands was not more valuable in financial terms, but perhaps heirs appreciated the flexibility of managing land, and the availability of by-employment. Small differences are apparent between individual manors. At Cleeve Prior, a champion manor where low entry fines after the plague show that demand for land had fallen, a very high proportion of transfers between family members before 1350 (76 per cent) fell to 35 per cent in 1351–1400, and continued at that level for the whole of the fifteenth century, without sign of recovery at the end. Blackwell, a manor which included in its boundaries the small town of Shipston, provides a comparison. Excluding the transfers of urban property, the town’s influence on its immediate rural surroundings apparently led to a relatively low figure of 59 per cent of holding passing within the family before 1350, and between 48 and 54 per cent for the later periods, including 1501–20. This manor’s higher level of entry fine confirms that demand for land was relatively high, which made family holdings more attractive for heirs.

These figures are of course based on inadequate evidence, as the main indication of one tenant being related to another is their shared surname, and the words ‘son’, ‘daughter’, or ‘brother’ only appear occasionally. The number of transactions within families must be regarded as minima, as sons-in-law, who indicate inheritance by daughters, cannot be recognized by their names alone, nor can the names of married daughters, of cousins, and other relatives. ⁵⁴ A Sedgeberrow dispute draws attention to inheritance problems arising when remarried women had children by different husbands. In 1347 Edith Roggers, a widow, died, leaving a messuage and a yardland and two cottages. Two claimants, Margery le Blake and Sarra le Blake came forward and offered 2s to the court to decide the case. Their names show that they were the children of an earlier marriage, but the court preferred John Roggers, a chaplain and Edith’s son by her most recent husband, whose claim might have been helped by his willingness to pay an entry fine of £8. ⁵⁵

Other well-documented estates record very similar trends in the proportions of apparently related and unrelated parties in land transfers. On the mainly Cotswold manors of the Winchcomb Abbey estate 61 per cent of transfers were made apparently within the family in the early fourteenth century, falling to 56 per cent in 1357–67, and 23–24 per cent in the period 1367–1466. In the fourteenth-century records of Eldersfield (Worcestershire) free tenants are prominent. Before 1349, transfers between family members accounted for 71 per cent of the total, and in two late fourteenth-century samples the figure slipped to 17 per cent and 14 per cent. The revival in land changing hands within the family after 1500 was especially marked on Worcestershire manors of the bishopric of Worcester, such as Hanbury, Kempsey, and Whitstones. ⁵⁶

Young people wishing to acquire land had to accept the disadvantages that accompanied the benefits of inheritance. When their parents were in charge they would be expected to remain on or near to the household, and work on the holding. The land that they acquired might be burdened with a commitment to maintain their parents, which for Richard Stappe senior of Blackwell included an annual 4 quarters 3 bushels of grain (half of it wheat) and cloth, hose, and shoes. ⁵⁷

After 1349 inheritance continued, but on a smaller scale, partly because families were reduced in size, leading to a shortfall of potential heirs. The manorial authorities were constantly complaining of the neglect of buildings and the run-down state of the land. Sons knew about the management of the family land, and if that had been deficient they were reluctant to take on the hard work of bringing weed-infested land and dilapidated buildings back into full production. Filial duty seems to have persisted and some sons and daughters were willing to take on a holding, while parents attempted to strengthen their commitment by the device of joint tenancy. In 1380 at Eldersfield, John Donne, Joan his wife, and John their son were granted a messuage and piece of land, which was of middling size judging from the annual rent that it owed of 4s 6d. In the next year half of a much larger holding with a rent of 30s was acquired by William Russell and William his son. ⁵⁸ These methods of persuasion could not offset the reduced scale of inheritance, but it continued and revived around 1500.

Throughout the later Middle Ages, but especially after 1349, heirs could acquire land and did not need to wait for the parental holding to become available. That was the only option for most children without any right to the inheritance, though a few might receive land acquired by the father, or be accommodated in a cottage carved out of the messuage.

One route to landholding for single men was to marry a widow and take over the tenancy of her land. Widows were under some pressure to marry, as the villagers would be wary of the moral danger posed by an independent unmarried woman, and they had doubts about a widow’s ability to contribute fully to such joint operations as ploughing. Lords feared that a widow’s new partner would acquire land without taking on the formal obligations of a tenant. They preferred male tenants who would pay rent and do services, and they readily gave permission for a widow’s marriage. Marriages to widows were more frequent in the period before 1349. On the sample of records from the Worcester Priory estate nineteen cases were recorded in that period, and ten after 1349. The practice almost ceased after 1450. A similar pattern of decline after the Black Death prevailed on the manors of Winchcomb Abbey. At Halesowen between 1270 and 1349, 63 per cent of widows married soon after their husband’s death, but this decreased to 26 per cent in 1349–1400. ⁵⁹ Widows presumably preferred not to be pressured into marriage, and neighbours’ opinions in favour of their marriage became less urgent. A growing number of widows remarried outside the manor, and forfeited their land, as their new husbands probably already had a holding. Men in search of a holding could still benefit from the need of widows to reduce their commitments by taking the land in return for a promise of maintenance, or by taking her land as a subtenant. Christina Batyn of Stoke Gifford (Gloucestershire) was able to maintain her tenancy by obtaining a licence from the lord in 1425 to let 5 acres of her half-yardland to four subtenants, including one who was apparently a relative. One of her neighbours, Juliana Rogers, in 1424 provided herself with a more manageable holding by giving up her half-yardland and took a messuage with a curtilage and 2 acres. ⁶⁰ One reason for the decline in records of widows attracting marriage partners was the growing trend for husbands and wives to hold land jointly, so that widows took over the holding as a full tenant, avoiding the custom of free bench, and not requiring permission to remarry. At all times of course a single man could acquire a holding by marriage when a daughter held land, because widows were not the only women with property.

An example will show how marriage to a widow might work in practice, and it will be seen how acquiring a widow as a wife connected with other processes in the acquisition and loss of land. Isabella Admont of Cleeve Prior is the central figure. Her husband, Thomas Admont or Admond, was tenant of a full yardland, and a leading figure in Cleeve, who died in 1377, after which Isabella gained the land as her free bench. Her active role in cultivating and managing the holding is suggested by litigation in which neighbours sought to recover debts and detained chattels from her. She owned an ox and was in possession of a plough coulter. She sublet a small part of the land to Thomas Hychen, who seems to have been a business partner, continuing an arrangement of her husband’s.

She formed another type of partnership in 1378 (the year after her husband’s death) when she was accused of fornication, and her land was declared forfeit. She was able to recover the holding by paying a fine of 2s. The man involved, Richard Wodelond, married her and acquired her land. Richard (like others in the same position) adopted the name of Admont. When Isabella died in 1380 he left the lordship and his chattels were to be seized to pay 8s for Isabella’s heriot. Walter Page, Thomas Admont’s brother (presumably a stepbrother) went to the court to claim hereditary right to the land, but for the sake of money, not the acres, as he surrendered the land to John Wille, and sold his rights. Wille was evidently upgrading his landholding, as he surrendered a half-yardland that he held as soon as he acquired the Admont yardland. Wille’s former holding was called Wille, so he was evidently abandoning a piece of family property. He may have married Agnes, John Clerk’s widow with a yardland and a half at her disposal. These people were not seeking stability and took a materialistic view of marriage. Hereditary succession was a source of a quick profit rather than a commitment to a particular holding. Richard Admont (previously Wodelond) gained a yardland and then dodged his responsibilities. ⁶¹

Most of those seeking land acquired it from the lord, by the processes of surrender and grant, which show the land market in operation. According to Table 3.5 about a fifth of land transfers on the Worcester Priory estate throughout the period 1300–1500 belonged to this type, focussing on transactions between living and apparently unrelated parties, so as to identify the means by which individuals could acquire land outside the inheritance system. On the manors of the Winchcomb Abbey estate sales of land were on a modest scale in the early fourteenth century, they account for 20 per cent of transfers in 1367–1405, and rose to 40 per cent in 1414–66.

Table 3.5 Transfers of land by surrender and grant between unrelated parties on a sample from the records of Worcester Cathedral Priory

The reversionary agreement provided a method of securing a succession to land for the younger generation. A would-be tenant, often male, would come to an understanding with a sitting tenant, sometimes a relative, but often not, and would pay a fine to the lord, resulting in a record on the court roll for future reference. By the terms of the agreement when the tenant and his wife had died or withdrawn from the tenancy the land would revert to the new tenant. On the Winchcomb Abbey estate, the system was well established by the 1340s (though the term reversion was not always used), but on the Blackwell/Shipston manor it increased after 1376. On the Worcester Priory lands, as a whole it became more frequent towards the end of the fifteenth century. This method of securing a future succession suggests a demand for land, even in times when tenants abandoned holdings and others were reluctant to take them. It could also serve as a device for families to pursue an inheritance strategy, in that sons or daughters without hereditary rights to land could be granted a reversion. It was an alternative to the arrangement of joint tenancy already mentioned.

To sum up the inheritance and transfer of land, peasants were subject to many pressures and stimuli, from lords, custom, population, and the market, but in all circumstances peasants used skills to secure outcomes favourable to themselves.

Serfdom, 1200–1540

The differences between free and unfree peasants were devised by lords and lawyers at the highest levels of society and government. Serfdom was a discriminatory device imposed for purposes of social control, but peasants were not simply victims. They could exercise some influence on the way serfdom worked, and in the long run they opposed and undermined it. The peculiar institution of English serfdom and villeinage needs to be examined, before seeing how peasants coped with it.

The clearly unfree section of the population in Domesday Book (in 1086) were the servi and ancillae (slaves and bondwomen) who worked on the lord’s demesne, often as ploughmen and dairy maids. They were freed in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, granted landholdings, and the males were sometimes called oxmen (bovarii); their successors in these smallholdings continued into the later Middle Ages. ⁶² Already in the early twelfth century the term nativus (feminine nativa), meaning born into servility, was being used. By 1170 the people previously called villeins were known on both the estate of the nuns of Caen in Gloucestershire, and on the manors of the bishopric of Worcester, as operarii (workers), suggesting that their defining characteristic was their obligation to do heavy labour service. Many of them held yardlands or fractions of these, giving them the capacity to work on the demesne with their own implements and draught animals. In Domesday and persisting into the twelfth century the term villanus can be translated as villager, and referred to the size of the holding rather than legal status. Villeinage later came to be equated with servility. ⁶³ By the late thirteenth century the unfree status of a substantial proportion of tenants had been firmly established, though they were identified by many terms: servi (serfs, a word favoured by the compilers of the 1279 Warwickshire Hundred Rolls), custumarii or consuetudinarii (customary tenants), rustici (rustics), bondi (bondsmen), and nativi (born serfs). These words seem to have been interchangeable. The people at the time used the English word ‘bond’, leading to names such as Alice le Bonde.

In the period 1200–1349 bondmen account for about a half of the rural population. The Warwickshire Hundred Rolls of 1279 named 4,437 people, of whom 2,318 (52 per cent) were servile. In the woodlands of the Arden included in that survey 73 per cent were free, and a majority of free tenants are recorded in other sources in the woodlands of west and north Worcestershire. On the other hand, Gloucestershire was predominantly servile, so in the region as a whole, free and unfree were probably evenly balanced. The unfree would have counted for less than a half of the population of England, which makes the west midlands a region with a relatively high level of servility. ⁶⁴

The unfree section of the population was living under constraints and disadvantages. Only a minority were liable to do heavy weekly labour services, working on the lord’s demesne for up to five days per week. In south-east Warwickshire, the burden was much lighter, and a growing proportion of each tenant’s obligations throughout the region consisted of cash rents. Labour services were not only performed by the unfree, but as they were major contributors in the following discussion reference will be made to labour services and failure to perform them. The lawyers applied tests for unfreedom, notably liability to tallage, a cash payment often levied collectively, such as £3 from all the serfs in a manor, fines for permission to marry or to leave the manor, or tolls on the sale of beasts. Anyone holding the office of reeve would be identified as a serf, and as serfdom was hereditary, a claim to be free would fail if a father or grandfather could be shown to have acted as a reeve. ⁶⁵

Serfs had in theory no access to the king’s courts. No higher authority could intervene between the serfs and the lord’s justice which was wielded in the manor court according to local customs. Lords claimed to own serfs, and occasionally we find them being conveyed as part of a land transfer. In 1314 Gilbert de Clare earl of Gloucester granted Robert of the Grove of Hanley Castle (Worcestershire) to Sir Roger Tyrel, ‘with his whole family (sequela) and all their land and chattels’. ⁶⁶ Lords were anxious to exercise powers as they chose, as when the lord of Kempsford (Gloucestershire), Patrick de Chaworth, in 1258 was said to be able to levy tallage every year in an arbitrary fashion, ‘they owe for aid at Michaelmas £5, sometimes more and sometimes less, according to their capabilities and the will of the lord’. ⁶⁷ The jurors providing information for some villages in the Warwickshire Hundred Rolls did not assign a value in money for aid or tallage as it was levied ‘at the lord’s will’. In 1299 the customary tenants of Stratford manor (Warwickshire) owed aid at Michaelmas, called stodynge, ‘which can increase or lessen at the will of the lord, and can each year be great or small’. ⁶⁸ The tendency in practice for these dues to be fixed at a regular annual sum did not remove the threat to make changes at a whim. Those liable to pay were bound to feel unease at this lack of certainty. Recognition, a collective payment resembling tallage, was imposed on servile tenants at the accession of a new lord, which was an unpredictable event, and the size of the payment was not always clearly fixed. An aim of the unfree peasants throughout medieval Europe, was to achieve some certainty in their obligations and the lords’ boasts of arbitrary powers were generally resented.

A claim by lords which was especially prominent in the west midlands was their supervision of the tenants’ principal goods or principalia, such as their ploughs, carts, brass pots, furnishings, implements, and utensils. Lords claimed that they had once provided their tenants with these items and they could not be sold or transferred. A tenant at Thornbury (Gloucestershire) fell foul of the manor court in 1338 when he took his goods and chattels to nearby Littleton-on-Severn, where he had acquired land ‘to the destruction of his native (servile) holding’. ⁶⁹ Another dimension of the lords’ belief that they ultimately owned their serfs’ goods was their punishment of unfree tenants who had appeared before courts other than their lords’, such as the hundred court or more often the church courts, and incurred penalties. The money that they paid belonged to their lord, or so he claimed, so Robert Jackehonen of Admington (Warwickshire) in 1341 lost ‘the lord’s chattels’ when accused in the church court of sexual misconduct with Alice, his maidservant. Robert found himself, because of his servile status, being punished twice for the same offence, once in the church court and again in his lord’s, and having his sins paraded in front of his neighbours on both occasions. Incidentally his neighbours said in the lord’s court that he had not committed the offence. ⁷⁰

Sexual relations outside marriage were also a matter for the lords’ courts when servile women who had strayed were liable to pay leirwite. These payments may be linked with the much more frequently levied fine for licence to marry, merchet. The marriage fine was mostly paid by the women intending to marry, and it gave them permission to marry wherever and/or whoever they pleased. The cost was not very high, usually 2s, but even such a sum was not easily afforded by a young woman working for 1d per day with many other expenses linked to marriage. Marriage fines involved much more than an inconvenient tax, as phrases could be used in court about the woman gaining some degree of freedom. In 1320 Beatrice daughter of Reynald at Hallow (Worcestershire) was granted her licence as if a general principle was involved: she was ‘to be free and quit of all burdens of servitude forever’, phrases appropriate to a manumission. ⁷¹

Payments were expected from servile men for permission to leave the manor. Young men often left to seek employment or land without permission or payment. At Thornbury (Gloucestershire) in 1337 the lord complained at the absence of reports on departed garciones nativorum, meaning the young sons from servile families, and at Kempsford in the same county in 1309 the homage was given the task of naming the same group. ⁷² Parents might encourage boys to seek education at schools, which could lead to a career in the church, but they risked financial penalties levied in the manor court, or had to pay for permission, first for school attendance, and again if the son was tonsured. Other restrictions included a prohibition on serfs acquiring free land, unless with the lord’s permission, which required a payment. Some paid to escape being compelled to take on the office of reeve of their manor.

This apparently mixed bag of penalties attached to serfdom had a coherent body of policy behind it, which was to supplement the lord’s revenues from large payments such as tallage, and by harvesting tolls, licence fees, and amercements if the rules were broken. The lords regarded their serfs as human capital, who should be controlled in such matters as marriage, inheritance, reproduction, and migration, making them available to provide the lord with money and labour. A good example of the use of servile regulation to protect the lords’ interests was the toll levied on the sale of oxen and horses, for which a licence was sometimes required. The lord did not wish to find that labour services could not be done because a serf had sold his draught animals. Also, if a substantial sum of money was involved (an ox would often be sold for 10s), the lord saw an opportunity to claim a small share. In our minds, and perhaps in the thoughts of the serfs, there must be a suspicion that the whole complex edifice of serfdom was not erected for merely practical and financial reasons, but that the subjection of serfs was integral to the idea of lordship. This might explain the perpetuation of the institution into a period of obsolescence after 1500.

The impositions were experienced by many thousands of peasant families in the west midlands, In theory they were enforced by the lords’ courts, and on occasion the steward who presided over the court as the lord’s representative insisted on heavy penalties for disobedience, like the £5 amercement demanded in 1337 from the tenants of Overbury (shortly afterwards reduced), and the £20 from the jurors of the Thornbury court in 1339 because they made allegations against the lord’s bailiff. ⁷³ These high-handed actions were really a sign of weakness, and illustrate the frustrations felt by the lords in relation to the manor courts, the effectiveness of which depended on the participation of tenants. They were supposed to report all of the infringement of the rules relating to serfs: marriage, principalia, tolls, and the others. These would have been regular occurrences in real life, but they appear in the court only occasionally. Exceptionally manorial courts would deal with a full range of cases, notably at Kempsford where tolls on animal sales, departing serfs, and young serfs being ordained as clergy were all reported in the court. ⁷⁴

The neglect of regular enforcement of servile dues must have been the result of a deliberate policy of the jurors and others in the court. In the case of a village with dozens of young women marriage fines would have been a regular occurrence, and their absence would have been obvious. Lords were aware of the offence of concealment, and some blatant cases were sometimes uncovered, like the departure of Simon Makegive from Broadwas (Worcestershire), which was reported in 1315 after ‘the whole vill’ had concealed his absence for twenty years. ⁷⁵ A confrontation at Stoke Prior (Worcestershire) arose in 1297 when the lord of the manor gave a general order that ‘all goods and chattels of serfs wherever they are found outside the manor’ should be forfeit to the lord. This would have been difficult to enforce, but the jury in the Stoke court claimed (implausibly) that there were no goods held by Stoke serfs outside the manor. ⁷⁶

Avoiding the payments and restrictions of serfdom provided no long-term solution to the oppressions inherent in the relationship between lords and serfs. One route to reducing antagonisms involved negotiation arising from tenants’ petitions. At the end of the 1299 survey of Bibury (Gloucestershire) the customers ‘sought’ that those mowing the hay in the lord’s meadow should be given 4 bushels of wheat, a wether (mature sheep) worth 18d, and a share of the hay. When tenants performed the bedrip, or harvest reaping service, they asked for a reward of a sheaf. ⁷⁷ This was a reasonable request as on other manors it was standard practice to give the hay makers a sheep to eat, and mowers and harvesters commonly received a bundle of hay or a sheaf. We are tempted to link this petition with a separate dispute over the Bibury lord’s exclusion of peasants from grazing on the demesne, which may have soured relationships.

Sometimes differences were resolved, as at Romsley (Worcestershire) where labour services had been contentious. In 1327 the customary tenants negotiated with the canons of Halesowen, their lords, to pay cash rather than doing such works as ploughing, mowing, harvesting, and collecting nuts. They paid a fee of 23s for this concession. ⁷⁸

Collective withdrawal of rents and services was one method of exerting pressure on a lord, best demonstrated at Thornbury (Gloucestershire) where in 1331–5 more than 424 cases were reported of non-performance of labour services, or the work being done badly. Another wave of absenteeism broke out in 1347–8. The protests could be connected with an apparent increase in labour services in 1331, and resentment at a bailiff’s behaviour. Perhaps the precise obligations were in doubt, as officials complained that workers had attended but left early. Also in the 1330s the tenants of Teddington and Alstone (Gloucestershire) were amerced more than £4 because they had failed to do labour services over a span of years. ⁷⁹ This seems to have been a collective withdrawal of labour, not a combination of individuals as at Thornbury.

These relatively small-scale and low-key protests by serfs seem small beer in comparison with the major confrontation between unfree tenants and their monastic lord at Halesowen between 1278 and 1283. The trouble began with the type of piecemeal frictions we have seen elsewhere—the lord demanded high amercements and penalties, such as a 10s marriage fine, and a collective amercement of £10 in 1276 for failing to elect a reeve. Tenants neglected labour services, or avoided marriage fines, and prevented livestock being taken as heriots. They sublet land without permission, and failed to take their corn to be ground at the abbey mill. The tenants showed boldness and confidence in taking their case to the royal courts, hiring lawyers to represent them, making the legal argument that the manor had once belonged to the king, and its ancient demesne status enabled the royal courts to protect the tenants from increases in rents and services. ⁸⁰ This may have been based on a belief that in the remote past all peasants enjoyed freedom under the king, a radical alternative to the assumption that long ago lords granted land and brought a dependent peasantry into existence. Violent confrontations followed in 1278 and 1282 and the leader of the rebellion, Roger Ketel, died after being ill-treated by the lord’s servants. The peasants lost their case in law, but as often resulted from such agitations, the lord thereafter trod more lightly.

The Halesowen agitation resembled dozens of other ancient demesne claims in other parts of England, but it was unusual in the west midlands. The dispute lasted a long time, with a probable beginning in 1252 and a final court case forty years later. It was a significant episode because it reached the courts in Westminster and led to serious violence. The disputes at Halesowen connect with the routines of serfdom, such as the levying of marriage fines and tallage, which occurred on most manors in the region. The main conclusion that we can draw is that just as the official structure of landholding was manipulated and adapted by the tenants, so the restrictions and costs of serfdom were modified, subverted, and questioned by the resistance of the serfs themselves. Mainly through concealment and lack of co-operation, the serfs avoided some of the disadvantages of their unfree condition.

Having considered the unfree before 1349, how did servile peasants cope afterwards? It has been said that there was a ‘headlong retreat’ from enforcing serfdom from the 1350s as lords realized that the institution was unsupportable in the new circumstances of scarce tenants. It has also been said that lords avoided strong actions in defence of their powers, and decided in the long run mainly on economic grounds that serfdom was not worth defending. ⁸¹

In the west midlands both church and lay lords clung to an institution which reflected their political power. Accordingly, the terms nativus or nativa (male serf or female serf), often elaborated in the phrase nativus de sanguine (serf by blood) to emphasize the heritability of serfdom, were used more often by clerks writing manorial documents after 1349. Land was sporadically called native rather than ‘customary’. Peasants may not have been able to read the documents, but the words would have been spoken in the court. The neifs of Mathon (Worcestershire) would have been fully aware of the discrimination declared in a custom in 1399 that when a tenancy ended because of death or surrender a free tenant was liable to a heriot of one beast, but a serf owed two. ⁸² An attempt to claim freedom was launched by Adam le Bedel of Elmley Castle in 1356. He had left the manor but returned to fight his case. The whole homage, that is the jury in the manor court, asserted that he was free born, but the lord would not accept this. He claimed that a large jury of twenty-eight had earlier found in favour of his servile status, and so Bedel remained a neif, and the homage was threatened with an amercement of £20 ‘for various false presentments’. ⁸³ The lord of Elmley was obviously determined that the old world would persist even after the epidemic. Lords could react strongly to insubordination. In 1362 at Eldersfield, when John de Haleford, a serf, left without permission, he was captured and taken into custody. However, as was often the case, coercion was tempered with inefficiency, and he eventually escaped and fled again. ⁸⁴ Tallage or aid, supposedly agreed as a regular annual rent around 1300, was said in the surveys of the Coventry Cathedral Priory in 1411 to be ‘more or less, at the will of the lord’, so the lord was clinging to the old formula. ⁸⁵

All of these examples tell us that lords persisted in their assertion of powers over servile peasants, not just in the uncertain decades immediately after the Black Death, but in the longer term. Their intransigence was exposed by Adam le Bedel and John de Haleford, who refused to play the role of passive victims. The conflicts continued after the 1360s and throughout the fifteenth century, when lords perpetuated records of servile status, though numbers were diminishing. They met with resistance from the serfs themselves who took no comfort from the reduction in numbers: their neighbours might have been freed, while their own inferiority and subjection continued.

The falling numbers of servile families can sometimes be traced from the individuals who paid servile dues, or who were routinely said to be nativi. At Chaddesley Corbett (Worcestershire) members of ten servile families were named in 1375, and by the years around 1440 they had been reduced to four. ⁸⁶ But serfdom did not go away: censuses of serfs were compiled: at Rockhampton (Gloucestershire), Earl’s Croome (Worcestershire), and manors of the bishopric of Worcester, and of Worcester Priory between 1474 and 1519 which recorded more than sixty servile families containing at least 200 named individuals. On the bishopric estate names were still being collected in the 1530s (see ‘The size of the household’ in Chapter 5).

Many of the adult male serfs would have attended the courts when the censuses were being compiled, and they must have feared adverse consequences. At Teddington, where the names of serfs were gathered in October 1508, Juliana daughter of Robert Heynes paid a 5s fine to be able to ‘marry wherever she pleases’. Marriage fines had almost ceased to be collected at that late date. ⁸⁷ A sense of menace was kept active when periodically a manor court would be told that ‘All naifs’ goods and chattels are seized in the lord’s hands’ and lands might be included in the order. These blanket threats were made before 1349 and continued until 1494. Although they were not followed by specific demands for money or confiscation of goods, they reminded everyone of the lords’ belief that all of the serfs’ possessions ultimately belonged to them. In particular, those chattels identified as principal goods became much more prominent after 1349, and inventories were made in considerable numbers in 1354–1434, in pursuit of the idea that furniture and agricultural implements belonged to the lord and could not be removed from a holding. ⁸⁸ Serfs must have felt threatened, as not all dues were unchangeable: marriage fines, which were more or less fixed at 2s, were occasionally increased to 5s, 6s 8d, 10s, or 13s 4d., reaching a height of £4 at Honeybourne (Gloucestershire) in 1405. ⁸⁹ At Halesowen, and specifically at the village of Romsley on the Halesowen estate, the levying of marriage fines, and the rate of such fines, together with a generally high level of financial demands through the court, could have been a factor in provoking a rebellion in 1386 in which the tenants refused to do services and rejected their servile status. The three leaders (including Agnes Sadler) were punished, but afterwards some of the lord’s demands were moderated. The Halesowen peasants retained their capacity to rebel, and the abbot needed to summon the aid of a royal commission. ⁹⁰

Serfs continued to protest against their burdens by hindering the enforcement of rules and refusing to pay selected unpopular dues. For example, on the bishop of Worcester’s estates common fines and recognition fines were withheld in a co-ordinated campaign in 1433–5, and a number of these were eventually removed. At Dumbleton in Gloucestershire a tallage in excess of £4 per annum, called the ‘winter gift’, a euphemism for a collective tax that was taken rather than given, was not paid after 1425 presumably in a co-ordinated action, and by 1460 the lord accepted the tenants’ resistance and pardoned the accumulated debt. ⁹¹

Serfs could escape from their status, or reduce their disadvantages, in various ways. They could purchase manumission, which was not always ruinously expensive. Marriage fines could be grants of freedom as well as licences to marry. General manumission for a family, not just an individual, could cost as little as 26s 8d (at Eldersfield in 1362) or 53s 4d in 1424 at Hallow. On the other hand the charge could be as high as £8, paid by Richard Bele to Worcester Priory in 1511. ⁹² Serfs must have asked ‘why should a free man pay money to obtain liberty that was unjustly denied?’

Walter Addecokke of Sheperdine in the manor of Rockhampton contested his servile status in 1472. This was a serious matter for the lord of the manor, William Berkeley, who attended the manor court in person, alleging that Addecokke was a villein and serf by blood. Walter came to court with his lawyer. The jury, undaunted by the presence of their lord, found that Walter was free, and his liberty should last for ever, together with that of his four children, and this was confirmed in a document sealed by the lord. Addecokke was determined to prove his case, and he spent money on a lawyer’s advice in order to establish a principle. ⁹³ Evidently the issue still mattered to both lord and serf even in the twilight years of serfdom.

The number of serfs diminished primarily by a combination of migration and official inertia. Serfs had left their manors before 1349, but records of departures without licence increased from the 1350s. A total of 346 are known to have left the manors of Worcester Cathedral Priory between 1349 and 1389, increasing in pace to a peak in the 1380s. In 1412 fifty-four were listed, and absentees continued to be noted for the rest of the fifteenth century. ⁹⁴ On the manors of Evesham Abbey the serfs were still leaving in the later part of the century, with forty-six reported in one court session at Ombersley in 1462, and nineteen at Sambourn (Warwickshire) in 1472. ⁹⁵ Repeated orders to return, putting pressure on the families of the absentees, were ignored. Migration was a widespread movement throughout society both before and after 1349, and although a serf who had cut contacts with his lord and manor gained his freedom, this was not the only reason for moving.

In the long run, a general relaxation of administrative controls worked in the serfs’ favour, as they were mentioned less frequently in the courts and gradually disappeared from view. Before 1349 the various obligations of serfs were enforced patchily because jurors and court officials failed to report breaches of the rules applied to marriage, migrations, and all of the other restrictions. In the fifteenth century this amnesia became habitual, and servile dues ceased to be mentioned. The peasants who managed court business, most of whom were not themselves serfs, kept quiet and helped their neighbours by allowing the irksome and humiliating status of the nativi to fade away.

Sometimes doubt is expressed about the degree to which serfdom stirred resentment in its declining years, but strong antagonism was expressed unequivocally at Elmley Castle by Henry Gybbe, who in 1477 discouraged tenants and serfs from buying firewood in the lord’s park. It was explained to the court that he did this because he was a neif of the lord’s, and that he acted ‘out of malice’ ‘to the lord’s disadvantage’. In other words, he expressed his exasperation with his servile condition by seeking to reduce the lord’s profits from sales of wood. ⁹⁶ Plenty of examples already given suggest a general and enduring sense of grievance against unfree status.

Conclusion

The holding defined the character and way of life of the peasantry, and to some extent the amount of land available to them was beyond their control. The proportions of complete yardlands, or half-yardlands, or smallholdings depended on the tenures established in each manor generations before 1200, the level of population, the market for land, and demand for agricultural produce and labour. Constrained by these impersonal forces, individual peasants and communities were limited in the choices that they could make, but the tenants could exert influence over division of holdings, subletting of land, manipulation of the transfer of holdings through inheritance, marriage, and the buying and selling of land. They operated in different economic circumstances, with rises and falls of population and prices, for which the entry fines provide an imperfect index of land values. The rise and slow death of serfdom seems more straightforward, as it is essentially a story of peasants pressing for freedom. In the period of decline lords adopted different positions: some were diehards and others more flexible, and also peasant attitudes ranged from acceptance to vigorous opposition, with a majority eroding servility by non-co-operation.

The connections between serfdom and landholding can be observed at the moment when new tenants took up holdings. The clerks who entered the conveyances on to the court roll chose their words carefully. The phrases used on different landed estates all differed but had generic similarity: ‘to him and his according to the custom of the manor’; ‘to him and his blood by custom of the manor’; ‘to her and her issue according to the custom of the manor’; ‘in bondage according to the custom of the manor’; ‘to him and his brood (sequela) in bondage by the custom of the manor’; ‘to him and his heirs and assigns according to the custom of the manor’. An essential feature was the primacy of custom, which meant that any disputes or problems would be decided in the lord’s manorial court, in which custom would be interpreted by a jury of tenants supervised by the lord’s steward. The wording did not always remind the tenants of the servile status of the tenure, but ‘villeinage’, ‘bondage’, and ‘neifty’ were scattered through the records.

The removal of the servile vocabulary is the first change that can be observed in these tenancy records, often in the 1380s. The terms could come back, so at Cleeve Prior after ‘in bondage’ ceased around 1386, native appeared between 1406 and 1428. Peasant preferences must have played a part in the eventual removal of the offending words, as objections may have been voiced in the court, and some of those in authority may have listened.

Peasant opinion must also have influenced the growing practice of making copies of the court record of land transfers available to tenants. These copies rarely survive as documents, though there were once thousands of them kept in small peasant archives. Their existence is recorded if a doubtful matter, such as liability to heriot, could be resolved by producing a copy in court. The first mention of a copy being consulted in the region comes from 1338 at Thornbury, but there are hints of ‘writings’ earlier. ⁹⁷ They had become commonplace by 1400. Peasants would have appreciated the utility of written evidence in protecting their interests, as shown when they paid a fee for the court roll to be scrutinized to justify some legal claim. However, they would have much preferred to prove their title with deeds, by which freehold land was conveyed, rather than a copy that emphasized their dependence on the lord’s court.

The phrases mentioned earlier which featured in the court records, and of course the copy, come from manors where customary tenure was hereditary in the long term, or ‘for ever’ as was sometimes said. Tenure for lives was widely practised in various parts of the region, meaning that the lord granted a new tenant, his wife, and their son or daughter with land for their lives. This version of customary tenure was especially prevalent in Gloucestershire, in no apparent geographical pattern: it is found in the Vale, on the high Cotswolds, in the vicinity of Bristol; monastic manors, and those held by lay lords were collecting rents from lands held by tenure for lives. It occurs in contrasting landscapes and social environments in the two northern counties, especially in western Worcestershire. The division between ‘copyhold by inheritance’ and ‘copyhold for lives’ can be observed across England in the early modern period. ⁹⁸ Tenure for lives developed gradually on some manors where inheritance had prevailed. It occasionally appears in the fourteenth century, and more often in the fifteenth and early sixteenth. In Worcestershire, a dozen examples (from 120 conveyances) are found at Kempsey between 1476 and 1512. Three examples are found at Cleeve Prior around 1500, and the same number at Romsley in the 1520s. Life tenure was more frequent at Elmley Castle in the early sixteenth century, with a cluster in the 1530s. Tenure for lives seems to have been preferred by some tenants, who would surrender a holding held for ‘to him and his’, and then pay a fine to receive the land back for three named lives: ‘Richard Buk, Margaret Buk and William Buk their son.’ A wife would succeed on her husband’s death without the conditions attached to ‘free bench’ and the son (or daughter if she was named) would follow without danger of inheritance disputes. The chosen heir might not have been the eldest son, as specified by the prevailing customs. This peasant preference cannot be applied to the long-term establishment of tenure for lives as the dominant custom on manors where it could stretch back to the early fourteenth century. The origins of the divergence of customs are not known.

Demand from peasants does partly explain the advance of leasehold tenures. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, individual customary tenants negotiated with their lords, offering to pay a fine for a new grant of their holding for cash rent, without labour services. These changes must have been to the tenants’ advantage because lords sometimes rewarded valued servants with a grant of a leasehold. Dozens of examples are known: they were not very numerous. Leasehold was also used on a larger scale by the radical and profit-seeking lord of the Berkeley estate in c.1295–1312 when the tenants had resisted changes in labour services. Throughout the region after 1349, following a flurry of new leasehold tenures on some manors, there was only a sporadic appearance of ‘farms for the term of years’ (for between seven and sixty years), in the fifteenth century. Demesne assets like land, meadows, mills, and fisheries were almost all held on lease, but only a few tenant holdings. Customary tenants appreciated the simple cash rent and lack of a long-term commitment that came with leasehold, but while it was adopted wholesale in eastern England, it was relatively scarce in the west midlands. ⁹⁹

Lords were not in complete control of tenures and tenant holdings: peasants had some influence.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0003

¹ S. Madge, ed., Abstracts of IPMs for Gloucestershire, part 4, 1236–1300 (British Record Society, 30, 1903), pp. 201–5.

² For example, on the Gloucester Abbey manors in 1266–7 the median figure was 48 acres: Hist Glouc, vol 3, pp. 44–213.

³ B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977), pp. 225–31.

⁴ RBW, p. 298.

⁵ J.R. Birrell, ‘Manorial Custumals Reconsidered’, P&P, 224 (2014), pp. 3–37.

⁶ RBW; Reg Wig; Madge, ed., IPMs Gloucestershire; E.A Fry, ed., Abstracts of IPMs for Gloucestershire, pt 5, 1302–58 (British Record Society, 40, 1910); WHR; Hist Glouc; J.Willis Bund, ed., IPMs for the County of Worcester, pt. 1, 1242–1299 (WHS, 1894); J. Willis Bund, ed., IPMs for the County of Worcester, pt. 2, 1300–1326 (WHS, 1909); HTC; B.A. Lees, ed., Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century: The Inquest of 1185 (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, 9, 1935); R.H. Hilton, Social Structure of Rural Warwickshire in the Middle Ages (DS Occasional Paper, 9, 1950).

⁷ D.C. Douglas, ed., English Historical Documents, vol 2, 1042–1189 (London, 1953), pp. 813–16; P.D.A. Harvey, ‘Rectitudines Singularum Personarum and Gerefa’, EHR 108 (1993), pp. 1–22. (yardlands are not named as such in this document, but their existence can be deduced).

⁸ R.H. Britnell, Britain and Ireland 1050–1530 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 185–204; J. Langdon and J. Masschaele,‘Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England’, P&P 190 (2006), pp. 35–81.

⁹ RBW, pp. 152–64, 167–71.

¹⁰ WHR, pp. 178–9; WCL, E4.

¹¹ RBW, pp. 160, 161.

¹² B.H. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers (New York, 1908), Appendix, p. 224.

¹³ WCL, E7; Hereford Cathedral Library, R1162.

¹⁴ CR Romsley, p. 48, Z. Razi, ‘The Myth of the Immutable English Family’, P&P, 140 (1993), pp. 3–44, especially pp. 7–9.

¹⁵ WCL, E15.

¹⁶ The social processes behind the land market are discussed in 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).

¹⁷ WHR, pp. 58–76, 203–6.

¹⁸ Some of the issues raised by subtenancy are discussed in R.H. Hilton, ed., The Stoneleigh Leger Book (DS, 24, 1960), pp. xxxviii–xliv; M.K. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community. The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 103–16; M. Tompkins, ‘Counting Houses: Using the Housing Structure of a Late Medieval Manor to Illuminate Population, Landholding and Occupational Structure’, in Life in Medieval Landscapes. People and Places in the Middle Ages, edited by S. Turner and R. Silvester (Oxford, 2012), pp. 225–38.

¹⁹ WHR, p. 95.

²⁰ WHR, pp. 188–9; R.M. Smith, ‘Kin and Neighbours in a Thirteenth Century Suffolk Community’, Journal of Family History 4 (1979), pp. 219–56.

²¹ WHR, p. 199.

²² WHR, pp. 140, 142, 210–12.

²³ RBW, p. 347.

²⁴ WA, ref. 705:134, BA1531/69.

²⁵ WCL, E12, E13.

²⁶ Hereford Cathedral Library, R1162; WCL, E8.

²⁷ WCL, E7; Hereford Cathedral Library, R1162. On the general importance of subletting, R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 131.

²⁸ R.K. Field, ‘The Worcestershire Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages’ (MA dissertation, University of Birmingham,1962), pp. 128, 131, 300.

²⁹ WCL, E10.

³⁰ WCL, E10, E15.

³¹ WCL, E15, E7.

³² WCL, E6.

³³ CR Romsley, pp. 36, 41–2, 56, 69.

³⁴ WCL, E10.

³⁵ Z. Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 38–43; P. Slavin, Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Turnhout, 2019), pp. 60–1, 66, 123 finds reduced hay crops and availability of grazing as well as higher grain prices.

³⁶ Nonarum Inquisitiones in Curia Scaccarii (London, Record Commission, 1807), pp. 407–15; C. Dyer, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Medieval Village: Little Aston (in Aston Blank), Gloucestershire’, TBGAS 105 (1987), pp. 165–81.

³⁷ Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, pp. 101–7.

³⁸ WCL, E6.

³⁹ GA, D678/1/M1/1/1, 2; East Raynham Library, Norfolk, box 25; GA, Badminton Muniments D2700/MAI/1.

⁴⁰ WA, ref. 705:134, BA1531/69, 69B.

⁴¹ C. Dyer, ‘A Medieval Village in a Cotswold Landscape: Pinbury in Duntisbourne Rous’, TBGAS, 137 (2019), pp. 191–213, especially 209–11.

⁴² WA, ref 705:56, BA3910/22, 24, 27, 33, 39, 40. For local variations in fines in southern England, including some increases in the late fourteenth century, J. Mullan and R. Britnell, Land and Family. Trends and Local Variations in the Peasant Land Market (Hatfield, 2010), pp. 71–83.

⁴³ GA, Badminton muniments, D2700, MJ11/1/2-5; MJ9/1-3.

⁴⁴ C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester 680–1540 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 287–91.

⁴⁵ TNA, SC2/175/67.

⁴⁶ WHR, PP. 178–9, 203–6; Cov Reg, pp. 541–4, 549–53.

⁴⁷ WHR pp. 206–12; Cov Reg, pp. 530–6.

⁴⁸ WCL, C847, C562.

⁴⁹ WHR, pp. 155–8, 286–9; Cov Reg, pp. 523–6.

⁵⁰ Hilton, ed., Stoneleigh, p. xli.

⁵¹ D. Greenblatt, ‘The Suburban Manors of Coventry, 1279–1411’ (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1967), pp. 29–31.

⁵² TNA, SC2 175/52.

⁵³ WCL, E4, E32, E33, E45.

⁵⁴ Z. Razi, ‘The Erosion of the Family-Land Bond in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: A Methodological Note’, in Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, edited by R.M. Smith (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 295–304.

⁵⁵ WCL, E15.

⁵⁶ Dyer, Lords and Peasants, pp. 302–5.

⁵⁷ WCL, E3.

⁵⁸ WA, ref. 705: 134, BA 1531/69B.

⁵⁹ Razi, Life, Marriage and Death, p. 138.

⁶⁰ GA, Badminton muniments, D2700 MJ11/1/2.

⁶¹ WCL, E28, E 29, E30.

⁶² M.M. Postan, The Famulus (EcHR supplement, 2, 1959).

⁶³ R.H. Hilton, ‘Freedom and Villeinage in England’, P&P 31 (1965), pp. 3–19.

⁶⁴ This is based on the estate surveys cited in note 6 above.

⁶⁵ Hilton, ‘Freedom and Villeinage’, p. 9; M. Bailey, ‘Tallage-at-Will in Late Medieval England’, EHR 134 (2019), pp. 25–58.

⁶⁶ Rec Hanley, p. 13.

⁶⁷ Madge, ed., IPMs for Gloucestershire, p. 22.

⁶⁸ WHR, pp. 265, 269, 270; RBW, p. 255.

⁶⁹ SRO, D641/1/4C/1.

⁷⁰ GA, D678/1/M1/1/1.

⁷¹ WCL, E9.

⁷² SRO, D641/1/4C/1; East Raynham Library, box 25.

⁷³ WCL. E13; P. Franklin, ‘Politics in Manorial Court Rolls: The Tactics, Social Composition and Aims of a pre-1381 Peasant Movement’, in Medieval Society and the Manor Court, edited by Z. Razi and R.M. Smith (Oxford, 1996), pp 162–98, especially p. 185.

⁷⁴ East Raynham Library, box 25.

⁷⁵ WCL, E7.

⁷⁶ WCL, E193.

⁷⁷ RBW, p. 374.

⁷⁸ CR Romsley, p. 82.

⁷⁹ Franklin, ‘Politics in Manorial Court Rolls’; WCL, E13.

⁸⁰ Z. Razi, ‘The Struggles Between the Abbots of Halesowen and their Tenants in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, in Social Relations and Ideas, edited by T.H. Aston, P. Coss, C.C. Dyer, and J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 151–67.

⁸¹ M. Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2014). This is based on a sample of south midland manors.

⁸² WAM, 21387.

⁸³ CR Elmley, p. 13.

⁸⁴ WA, ref. 705:134, BA 1531/69.

⁸⁵ Cov Reg, pp. 526, 529, 544.

⁸⁶ SCLA, DR5/2737-2799.

⁸⁷ WCL, E92.

⁸⁸ R.K. Field, ‘Worcestershire Peasant Buildings, Household Goods and Farming Equipment in the Later Middle Ages’, Med Arch 9 (1965), pp. 137–45.

⁸⁹ GA, D678/61.

⁹⁰ Razi, ‘Abbots of Halesowen’, pp. 164–6.

⁹¹ R.E.G. Kirk, ed., Accounts of the Obedientars of Abingdon Abbey (Camden Society, new series, 51, 1892), pp. 155, 160.

⁹² WA, ref. 705: 134, BA 1531/69; Hereford Cathedral Library, R1163; WCL, E93.

⁹³ GA, Badminton muniments MJ9/1–2.

⁹⁴ P. Hargreaves, ‘Seigniorial Reaction and Peasant Responses: Worcester Priory and its Peasants after the Black Death’, Midland History 24 (1999), pp. 53–78.

⁹⁵ WA, ref. 705:56, BA3910/27; SCLA, DR5/2357.

⁹⁶ CR Elmley, p.181.

⁹⁷ SRO, D641/1/4C/2.

⁹⁸ M. Bailey, ‘The Transformation of Customary Tenure in Southern England, c.1350–c.1500’, AgHR 62 (2014), pp. 210–30.

⁹⁹ Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 147–60; B. Wells-Furby, The Berkeley Estate 1281–1417 (BGAS, 2012), pp. 95–118; M. Bailey, After the Black Death. Economy, Society and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2021), pp. 92–102, 301–7.