Rise of Peasants Alan Payne Date
Carting in the Luttrell Psalter dated about 1330 (courtesy British Library)
Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the Black Death was the decline of serfdom (the status of bondmen or unfree peasants) and the feudal obligations they owed to their lord. These obligations were not just to work on the lord’s demesne land; they comprised a whole range of legal restrictions.[1] Serfs holding tied tenures were not permitted to leave the land without their lord’s agreement and were persecuted and re-captured if they did. The goods they held were legally owed to their lord on death (blocking the inheritance of future generations), Unfree peasants were excluded from justice in the king’s common law courts and the manorial court was unlikely to support them. The definition of who was a serf had become extremely complex by the mid-1300s. In theory, peasants could be deemed unfree either because they had servile status (their father was a serf) or because the land they held was servile by tenure (at the will of the lord).[2] The high mortality of the plague years brought frequent changes in the ownership of strips of common land, which added complexity to holdings.
Peasantry in Box
In practice, the status of peasants in Box was much more varied: some freemen acquired tied strips of land in common fields (and risked their status being reduced to serfdom); some servile villeins acquired free land (which required surrender to their lord and possible re-granting at high rent); and some serfs had mixed marriages with free peasants (causing uncertainty in the status of children).[3] All peasants required to sell surpluses at market to pay rents, taxes and fines, which put further pressure on them in years of floods, droughts, famine and plague.[4] The peasants took small parcels of land at rock bottom prices after the Black Death and terrified the nobility because of their economic power, resulting in litigation such as the Sumptuary Law of 1363 restricting the quality and colour of cloth that each level in society could wear. Most of them lapsed back to subsistence levels because the basic unit of labour was still the family.
The decline in wealth and status was not uniform and a few people managed to rise above the norm in Box.[5] The Poll Tax List of 1377 identified 175 persons in Box over the age of 14, residents who were liable to pay tax of a groat (2p), a significant sum at the time.[6] There would have been more residents because the clergy were assessed separately and beggars and vagrants omitted.[7] To put the development into context, the Tax List of 1322 recorded only 17 residents. Of course, the circumstances of the two surveys reflected different economic conditions but the total number on the list is dramatically larger.
Rural Revolution
The second half of the 14th century produced dramatic change in the lives of Box people, a period of unprecedented turmoil which one historian described as having ‘a revolutionary quality’ and another ‘a disastrous period in English history’.[8] William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman was probably written about 1365. It is difficult to unravel because it tells an allegorical dream about Will who imagines how the Christian world should be with repentance for sin, followed by penance in pilgrimage and pardon – but this world is totally failing. The friar offered an easy pardon because he was more concerned with a donation. Ecclesiastic corruption was shown as widespread, a sentiment which was picked up by ordinary people and which came to a head in 1381.
The Peasant Revolt of 1381 started in south east England, in opposition to high taxation and demanding the full abolition of serfdom. The lines of poetry When Adam delved (dug) and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? by its leader John Ball, reflect the time before aristocracy emerged as landlords. The discontent spread to the west: 40 villages from Devon to Sussex;
8 manors of Shaftesbury Abbey in Wiltshire and Dorset; 2 manors of the Priory of Bath in Somerset; and a draft charter of freedom from the men of Somerset.[9] The hostility was particularly against mills appropriated to monastic control (as in Box), who were believed to keep back grain for personal use or speculation.[10] Rural discontent came from articulate craftsmen and artisans who were unfree as well as peasants and labourers.[11] These people were deeply opposed to serfdom, as shown in the 1430s by a serf of Malmesbury Abbey who on his deathbed borrowed £10 to obtain his freedom saying: it wold be more joifull to him than any worlelie goode.[12] Despite all the noise, the rise of the peasantry had little lasting effect.
For the lord there was severe agricultural problems, whilst for some tenants it offered opportunity, The lords of Box Manor had invested heavily in their personal farmland. About the time of Domesday, they held 1 hide (120 acres) and the Bigods and Bohuns increased this in the medieval boom period by taking tenanted land into demesne (farmed under the lord's direct control). The Moleyns appear to have continued this system for some time through their local officials.[13] But lower bread prices and higher labour costs caused the price of corn to fall in the period from 1350 until the early 1400s.[14] This had profound effects on Box’s economy where we might imagine that every year the Moleyns’ steward reported a loss and the impossibility of forcing peasants to pay rent arrears or to do service on the home farm. By about 1395, the Moleyns took the decision to stop farming themselves and to lease out the corn demesne farmland.[15] It was a momentous change and, henceforth, the income of the lord of Box Manor came from tenant rents and changes in the tenancies, rather than directly from agriculture.
As feudal tenure gave way to customary or copy hold tenure, a new level of person developed in Wiltshire based on holdings of a virgate (approximately 30 acres).[16] The division of virgates into blocks of land rather than separated field strips gave autonomy to those tenants to diversify their husbandry and to generate surpluses. The consequence was that the status of a villanus (villein) gradually fell away with some virgatus (virgate-holders) rising to a higher status. It was these virgate-holders who became the dominant authority in Box, often local gentry and knights, sometimes local lay officials who ran estates on behalf of the lord.[17] Many had been serfs whose families had been in the area for 100 years and who already had local positions as reeves, rent collectors or assessors.[18] At first, they took short-term holdings for periods of 5 to 10 years on a fixed rent. Often under-capitalised, they needed to support each other with rent guarantees for up to £100 (in modern terms perhaps £80,000).[19] The Domesday Book listed 7 virgates and 19 cottars, so it is possible that the farmers in Box emerged from the cottar ranks.
The farmers paid a set fee to the landlord in advance (rent) and were entitled to sell any surplus from their holding at the developing markets. This was the same system as tax being farmed out to sub-contractors and the name farmer replaced the old distinction between free and unfree peasants.[20] Wealthier peasants bought out their servitude (manumission) and sub-divided their estates for their children's inheritance. Landlords lost their income from heriot (inheritance), merchet (daughter's marriage) and other fines, but they were guaranteed a regular rent from the land in advance. Poorer peasants on marginal land often gave up farming and sought employment (thereby breaking their servile status) and the land converted to pasture or was left uncultivated (frisc).[21] Cottars died out as a social class. In good years they had survived by grazing animals on common land and relied on wages, especially at harvest time. In the late 1300s they lived in wretched poverty, unable to pay their rent; obliged to sell their possessions and, ultimately, they died out.
Numerous different types of land tenure existed in Box at this time, such as socage (fixed payment), quit-rent (commutation of services), customary tenure, copyhold, freehold (fee simple), tenure requiring services to the lord including knight service and agricultural labour service and spiritual service. Some tenants were offered specific contractual leases (rental leases for a fixed term with limited service to the lord’s household). We see a contractual lease in Box in 1408 when John Westbury held land for the term of his life on payment of: a rose yearly at SJB (the feast day of St John the Baptist on 24th June), a symbolic gesture of a past age.[22] The customs of the manor were recorded in the manorial court roll and frequently were also for up to three lives.
Similarly, the precise terms of new copyhold tenures needed to be recorded for all parties to approve. There were usually three copies – one kept by the lord, one by the tenant, and one held in the manorial court records.[23] Wiltshire copyhold tenures usually specified a time period of three lives and the repair of buildings became the tenant's responsibility.[24] Some land went to individuals, some to groups of tenants. Scrubland, waste and woodland areas were often held as copyhold.[25] These new types of tenure gave tenants much more security than the bondmen had in the past.
Peasantry in Box
In practice, the status of peasants in Box was much more varied: some freemen acquired tied strips of land in common fields (and risked their status being reduced to serfdom); some servile villeins acquired free land (which required surrender to their lord and possible re-granting at high rent); and some serfs had mixed marriages with free peasants (causing uncertainty in the status of children).[3] All peasants required to sell surpluses at market to pay rents, taxes and fines, which put further pressure on them in years of floods, droughts, famine and plague.[4] The peasants took small parcels of land at rock bottom prices after the Black Death and terrified the nobility because of their economic power, resulting in litigation such as the Sumptuary Law of 1363 restricting the quality and colour of cloth that each level in society could wear. Most of them lapsed back to subsistence levels because the basic unit of labour was still the family.
The decline in wealth and status was not uniform and a few people managed to rise above the norm in Box.[5] The Poll Tax List of 1377 identified 175 persons in Box over the age of 14, residents who were liable to pay tax of a groat (2p), a significant sum at the time.[6] There would have been more residents because the clergy were assessed separately and beggars and vagrants omitted.[7] To put the development into context, the Tax List of 1322 recorded only 17 residents. Of course, the circumstances of the two surveys reflected different economic conditions but the total number on the list is dramatically larger.
Rural Revolution
The second half of the 14th century produced dramatic change in the lives of Box people, a period of unprecedented turmoil which one historian described as having ‘a revolutionary quality’ and another ‘a disastrous period in English history’.[8] William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman was probably written about 1365. It is difficult to unravel because it tells an allegorical dream about Will who imagines how the Christian world should be with repentance for sin, followed by penance in pilgrimage and pardon – but this world is totally failing. The friar offered an easy pardon because he was more concerned with a donation. Ecclesiastic corruption was shown as widespread, a sentiment which was picked up by ordinary people and which came to a head in 1381.
The Peasant Revolt of 1381 started in south east England, in opposition to high taxation and demanding the full abolition of serfdom. The lines of poetry When Adam delved (dug) and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? by its leader John Ball, reflect the time before aristocracy emerged as landlords. The discontent spread to the west: 40 villages from Devon to Sussex;
8 manors of Shaftesbury Abbey in Wiltshire and Dorset; 2 manors of the Priory of Bath in Somerset; and a draft charter of freedom from the men of Somerset.[9] The hostility was particularly against mills appropriated to monastic control (as in Box), who were believed to keep back grain for personal use or speculation.[10] Rural discontent came from articulate craftsmen and artisans who were unfree as well as peasants and labourers.[11] These people were deeply opposed to serfdom, as shown in the 1430s by a serf of Malmesbury Abbey who on his deathbed borrowed £10 to obtain his freedom saying: it wold be more joifull to him than any worlelie goode.[12] Despite all the noise, the rise of the peasantry had little lasting effect.
For the lord there was severe agricultural problems, whilst for some tenants it offered opportunity, The lords of Box Manor had invested heavily in their personal farmland. About the time of Domesday, they held 1 hide (120 acres) and the Bigods and Bohuns increased this in the medieval boom period by taking tenanted land into demesne (farmed under the lord's direct control). The Moleyns appear to have continued this system for some time through their local officials.[13] But lower bread prices and higher labour costs caused the price of corn to fall in the period from 1350 until the early 1400s.[14] This had profound effects on Box’s economy where we might imagine that every year the Moleyns’ steward reported a loss and the impossibility of forcing peasants to pay rent arrears or to do service on the home farm. By about 1395, the Moleyns took the decision to stop farming themselves and to lease out the corn demesne farmland.[15] It was a momentous change and, henceforth, the income of the lord of Box Manor came from tenant rents and changes in the tenancies, rather than directly from agriculture.
As feudal tenure gave way to customary or copy hold tenure, a new level of person developed in Wiltshire based on holdings of a virgate (approximately 30 acres).[16] The division of virgates into blocks of land rather than separated field strips gave autonomy to those tenants to diversify their husbandry and to generate surpluses. The consequence was that the status of a villanus (villein) gradually fell away with some virgatus (virgate-holders) rising to a higher status. It was these virgate-holders who became the dominant authority in Box, often local gentry and knights, sometimes local lay officials who ran estates on behalf of the lord.[17] Many had been serfs whose families had been in the area for 100 years and who already had local positions as reeves, rent collectors or assessors.[18] At first, they took short-term holdings for periods of 5 to 10 years on a fixed rent. Often under-capitalised, they needed to support each other with rent guarantees for up to £100 (in modern terms perhaps £80,000).[19] The Domesday Book listed 7 virgates and 19 cottars, so it is possible that the farmers in Box emerged from the cottar ranks.
The farmers paid a set fee to the landlord in advance (rent) and were entitled to sell any surplus from their holding at the developing markets. This was the same system as tax being farmed out to sub-contractors and the name farmer replaced the old distinction between free and unfree peasants.[20] Wealthier peasants bought out their servitude (manumission) and sub-divided their estates for their children's inheritance. Landlords lost their income from heriot (inheritance), merchet (daughter's marriage) and other fines, but they were guaranteed a regular rent from the land in advance. Poorer peasants on marginal land often gave up farming and sought employment (thereby breaking their servile status) and the land converted to pasture or was left uncultivated (frisc).[21] Cottars died out as a social class. In good years they had survived by grazing animals on common land and relied on wages, especially at harvest time. In the late 1300s they lived in wretched poverty, unable to pay their rent; obliged to sell their possessions and, ultimately, they died out.
Numerous different types of land tenure existed in Box at this time, such as socage (fixed payment), quit-rent (commutation of services), customary tenure, copyhold, freehold (fee simple), tenure requiring services to the lord including knight service and agricultural labour service and spiritual service. Some tenants were offered specific contractual leases (rental leases for a fixed term with limited service to the lord’s household). We see a contractual lease in Box in 1408 when John Westbury held land for the term of his life on payment of: a rose yearly at SJB (the feast day of St John the Baptist on 24th June), a symbolic gesture of a past age.[22] The customs of the manor were recorded in the manorial court roll and frequently were also for up to three lives.
Similarly, the precise terms of new copyhold tenures needed to be recorded for all parties to approve. There were usually three copies – one kept by the lord, one by the tenant, and one held in the manorial court records.[23] Wiltshire copyhold tenures usually specified a time period of three lives and the repair of buildings became the tenant's responsibility.[24] Some land went to individuals, some to groups of tenants. Scrubland, waste and woodland areas were often held as copyhold.[25] These new types of tenure gave tenants much more security than the bondmen had in the past.
References
[1] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.5
[2] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.10
[3] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.18, 22
[4] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 1973, Maurice, Temple, Smith, p.16
[5] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 1973, p.34
[6] Victoria County History, Vol IV, p.307
[7] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.162
[8] Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 2002, Yale University Press, p.265
[9] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.6, 38-41 and Poll-Tax payers of 1377 | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
[10] Poll-Tax payers of 1377 | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
[11] Average figures from Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.171
[12] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.134
[13] John Hare, A Prospering Society: Wiltshire in the later Middle Ages, 2011, University of Hertfordshire Press, p.85
[14] Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, p.64
[15] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.85
[16] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.117-18
[17] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.36
[18] Peter J Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England,1962, Macmillan & Co, p.82
[19] NJ Williams, Tradesmen in early Stuart Wiltshire, Wiltshire Record Society, Vol 15, 1960, p.90
[20] Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, p.278, 358
[21] Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England, p.30
[22] JL Kirby, Abstracts of feet of fines 1377-1509, Wiltshire Record Society, Vol 41, 1986, p.62
[23] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.118
[24] Joseph Bettey, Wiltshire Farming in 17th Century, Wiltshire Record Society, Volume 57, 2005, p.xxxiv
[25] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.42
[1] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.5
[2] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.10
[3] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.18, 22
[4] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 1973, Maurice, Temple, Smith, p.16
[5] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, 1973, p.34
[6] Victoria County History, Vol IV, p.307
[7] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.162
[8] Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, 2002, Yale University Press, p.265
[9] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.6, 38-41 and Poll-Tax payers of 1377 | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
[10] Poll-Tax payers of 1377 | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)
[11] Average figures from Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.171
[12] EB Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Late Medieval England, p.134
[13] John Hare, A Prospering Society: Wiltshire in the later Middle Ages, 2011, University of Hertfordshire Press, p.85
[14] Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, p.64
[15] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.85
[16] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.117-18
[17] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.36
[18] Peter J Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England,1962, Macmillan & Co, p.82
[19] NJ Williams, Tradesmen in early Stuart Wiltshire, Wiltshire Record Society, Vol 15, 1960, p.90
[20] Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages, p.278, 358
[21] Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England, p.30
[22] JL Kirby, Abstracts of feet of fines 1377-1509, Wiltshire Record Society, Vol 41, 1986, p.62
[23] John Hare, A Prospering Society, p.118
[24] Joseph Bettey, Wiltshire Farming in 17th Century, Wiltshire Record Society, Volume 57, 2005, p.xxxiv
[25] Rodney Hilton, Bondmen Made Free, p.42