It was of course their estates that financed landowners’ lifestyle. Neither nobility nor gentry have left the account series of the great Benedictine lords and so establishing trends, especially success or failure, is not easy. Nevertheless, for most of the period it is possible at least to discern their approaches to estate management. Most problematic is the period before the thirteenth century, when records are extremely sparse. Analysis of Domesday Book (1086) suggests that the greater landowners did best if they had lands which could be leased profitably and that lords were more likely to make money, either directly or from lessees, from woods and pastures than from arable husbandry. The limited evidence for the twelfth century offers confirmation: nobles travelled round their estates, consuming the produce of home farms and leasing more distant properties; if there was any direct exploitation for profit, pastoral farming was the preferred means. Although they employed stewards and other clerks, and there is some evidence of interest in more intensive exploitation, a hands-off approach was simplest for men who had large cross-Channel estates. The vast estates of many of the Anglo-Norman tenants-in-chief provided an income large enough to build castles and patronize religious houses even though they were subin-feudating up to 80 per cent or more of their land. By c.1200, inflation, rising consumption costs, especially building, and the pressure of John’s financial demands were all forcing tenants-in-chief to reassess their attitude to their estates; what was left after subinfeudation had to be made to pay much more.
Study of the nobility’s estate management in the ‘high farming’ period from c.1180, before it began to retreat after the Black Death, reveals them operating much like the ecclesiastical lords. There is no observable difference in the timing of their taking their leased lands back in hand. Subsequently they reorganized their lands into receiverships, breaking up the feudal honours, and acquired a hierarchy of local and central officials who produced centralized accounts for them. Like the clerics, they exploited whatever was available to them: rents, the grain market, in which the Clares were active, cattle, reared for example on the great north midlands vaccaries of the earls of Lancaster, sheep, on the Holderness lands of Isabel de Forz, mining, and the profits of boroughs and jurisdictions which predominated in the economies of the Welsh marcher lordships. The Forz lands under Isabel offer an excellent instance of adaptation of production to changing economic and agrarian conditions; that by the end of the thirteenth century some lay lords were introducing sophisticated profit and loss accountancy suggests that Isabel’s readiness to respond to change was not exceptional. Doubtless some lords were more efficient and assiduous than others but, although most great lords, lay and clerical, were in debt in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, this represented an anticipation of income that the estate could normally carry, even if it was sometimes quite large, especially if a lord was building. As with the clerical lords, it is now clear that berating the nobles for profligacy and inadequate investment as some historians have done is inapposite. They invested what they needed to, in land purchases, speculative ventures like new mills or new towns, in officials and in keeping their estates in good repair, while the whole object of the exercise was to enable them to continue with the consumption that was central to their political and social existence. A Thomas of Lancaster who expended about ?7,500 on his household in 1318-19 was unusual both in the size of his income (over ?11,000 a year) and the grandiosity of his ambitions, and to generalize from him to conclude that the nobles were reckless consumers of their substance is dangerous. In this respect, economic historians’ recent shift of interest from the supply side to the demand or consumption side has immeasurably enhanced our understanding of the landlord economy.
Study of consumption raises the larger issue of what benefits lords expected to derive from their estates, and it is this question which might lead us to differentiate the approach to estate management in the high farming period of the great lay lords from that of the clerics. One fundamental difference is that, for the clerics, who were no longer central players in the world of landowning power politics, land was primarily an economic asset which enabled them to consume at levels that would enhance their status and encourage further donations. By contrast, for nobles land was before all else a means to political power. The lordship over men that it brought was what gave them their status, and their consumption levels enabled them to live up to that status, it did not create it. Thus, for a family like the Clares, their Welsh marcher lordships, economically less desirable but offering powerful lordship over many of the inhabitants, might be more valuable than their agriculturally rich but seigniorially relatively weak East Anglian properties. What spurred the nobles into active exploitation of their estates was less the prospect of great wealth than fear of indebtedness that might lead to the loss of their lands. The creditors they feared were not merchants, whom they could usually ignore, but predatory kings like John, who might foreclose on debts owed directly to them or debts owed to the Jews which ultimately fell to the crown. Ecclesiastical lords were also protected from the rough and tumble of politics by the fact that, in contrast with previous centuries, they no longer needed to defend their lands against rapacious lay patrons or enforced subinfeudation. On the contrary, by the thirteenth century it was the clerics’ acquisition of gentry lands, often those once subinfeudated, which led to a clamour for preventative measures. The fortunes of lay magnates’ lands remained more uncertain, both for good and for ill. Although kings had to exercise greater restraint towards the property of lay tenants-in-chief after Magna Carta, lay lords could still lose their lands to a rival claimant or to political miscalculation, and there was always the possibility that a profligate heir could force the family to sell part of its lands, or lack of a direct male heir end its existence. On the other hand, a fortunate marriage could work instant repair to a family’s finances. It is therefore arguable that it was the ecclesiastical lords who took a longer, more institutional, view in planning the development and exploitation of their lands. Against this, once great lay lords had councils, as most did by 1300, these provided a measure of insulation against the incompetence of individual lords. Moreover, despite the importance of institutional continuity among religious corporations, it is evident that individual heads of religious houses, like Henry of Eastry at Canterbury, could make a significant difference to the house’s economy. On balance, however, it is clear that the priorities and methods of the great lay and clerical lords were not always the same.
Turning to the gentry’s experience in the high farming period, we have seen already that some of them may have been under financial pressure in the thirteenth century. Scarcity of gentry accounts at this time has focused attention on the failures, whose sales and debts turn up in the records of ecclesiastical lords and of the Jews, but there is enough evidence to show both enterprise and success. The energy of rising professionals has been noted by historians but they do not seem to have been unique. In the arable areas, the great lords had reserved to themselves the largest and richest manors with the most numerous unfree workforce, so that the lesser lords had to spend more on labour and to profit as much as they could from their surplus grain. In the wooded Coventry region, where there was room for assarting, the successful enlarged and consolidated their estates by reclamation and purchase and concentrated primarily on livestock farming, while the unsuccessful had lands that were less suitable for exploitation. Gentry, like nobles, also needed to spend money on building and repairs on their estates. Several, perhaps many, undoubtedly got badly into debt and they found it harder than the nobility to ignore their creditors; again unlike the
Nobility, staving off bankruptcy through selling part of their estate could leave them with badly diminished lands. That Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews in 1290 was part of the bargain that got him a tax indicates some financial desperation among the gentry. But, as we have seen, there was no generalized crisis, and those who failed were as likely to come from the better-off families as from the marginal ones.
After the Black Death the behaviour of the lay magnates was again very similar to that of the clerics, although it is possible that the laymen, with the exception of the Black Prince, failed to exhibit quite the tenacity of some of the clerics in hanging on to their control over their tenants. Both types of lord nevertheless benefited from the ‘Indian summer’ of high farming in the 1350s and 1360s when prices were high and wage demands did no more than keep pace with prices. The nobility followed the same pattern as the clerics in leasing their demesnes in response to falling prices and rising wages, starting in the 1360s and virtually completing the process by 1400. But that did not mean the end of their concern for their estates: accounts reveal that, even though the lords were now rentiers, their officials were still keeping careful track of their accounts and that some nobles supervised their officers assiduously, even when absent on campaign. It is now evident that the nobility as a whole were not suffering from declining incomes from the later fourteenth century. Even in the mid-fifteenth, when they lost much of their Welsh revenue as English authority in Wales slipped alarmingly, and when the crown failed to pay its war debts to its noble captains, great lords like the dukes of York and Buckingham were apparently riding out the storm, York by raising over ?3,000 by sales and mortgages that barely dented his huge estate. Contrary to earlier belief, most lords spent no more than 10 per cent of their income on retaining and those who spent much more, mostly northern marcher lords, may well have recouped much of this money from the crown. If retrenchment was required, it was achieved by cutting down on the number and size of households and, unlike the ecclesiastical lords, the lay magnates always had the possibility of a lucrative marriage, for heirs were always attractive to the families of heiresses. When the war went well, there were large profits to be made from booty and ransoms.
The estate management of the gentry is much better recorded in the period after the Black Death. Most also became rentiers, although more gentry than nobles seem to have kept home farms, and they too had officials and accounting systems, if on a smaller scale. Most exercised care in the administration and upkeep of their lands and, unlike the nobility, many still produced for the market. This was now a more specialized semi-luxury market geared to a wealthier population: for example malted barley, wool, cattle, the rural industries of cloth, metalwork and mining. Although there were few profligate landowners at any level, it is mostly true that the lower the income with which they were trying to maintain the correct lifestyle, the more care was exercised. Thus, Richard, duke of York, had no need to cream off the profits of the Wiltshire cloth industry by raising his rents, and the greater gentry, although mostly more watchful rentiers than many of the nobles, were less active exploiters than those below them (at least until the expansion of sheep-farming in the late fifteenth century), while those at the bottom, like the minor gentry of the Warwickshire Arden, were the most enterprising of all. The major exceptions were the upwardly mobile professionals, like the East Anglian Townshends and Pastons or the midlands Catesbys, whose close involvement with their estates continued as their lands grew. The gentry were arguably harder hit than the nobility by post-Black Death economic conditions: they had less villein labour and seem to have felt that neither nobles nor clerics were paying their way for the war. In the later fourteenth century they complained incessantly in parliament about recalcitrant tenants and labourers and their efforts to shift the tax burden led to the poll taxes of 1377 to 1381. On the other hand, since the economy was depressed, there were none of the dangers of indebtedness and overexpansion of the earlier boom period, and it seems that very few gentry failed financially between c.1350 and 1500.
World History
