Most popular political activity in rural society, however, revolved around local disputes between lord and tenants. To understand these it is essential to understand the nature of the late medieval manor. The manor was both a unit of landownership and a unit of jurisdiction with its own court, held by a manorial lord. It sometimes coincided with the territory of a particular village, but often did not. Each manor had its own customs or laws which determined many aspects of village life, for instance tenants’ rights of inheritance to land; the level of rent, fines and labour services owed to the lord; and how different types of land and other resources (such as common pasture and woodland) could be used by the tenants. So manorial customs were not quaint records of rural practices, they were rules and restrictions that determined the population’s quality of life: the distribution of wealth and rights to freedom of action. Customs were depicted as unchanging and ‘ancient’, but in fact they were often altered, sometimes officially by the manorial lord with the consent of the jurors of the manorial court, who represented the tenants; sometimes by the manorial lord in the face of tenant protests; sometimes by the tenants when the lord was indifferent or the manor poorly administered.
Disputes between lords and tenants over customs including the nature of serfdom, were fragmented in the same way that manorial jurisdiction was. They occurred manor by manor, making it difficult to offer a general history. English manors are well documented from the late thirteenth century onwards because of the large number of manorial court rolls that survive, and these rolls reveal much evidence of disputes between lords and tenants, as well as between tenants. Tensions arose within the structure of the manor because it was in lords’ interests to maximize income drawn from land and tenants, while similarly, it was in tenants’ interests to maximize their income by paying as little as possible to their lord in money, goods or labour, and using the land and resources within the manor to the greatest possible extent. But disputes were not purely economic: ordinary people appear to have hated serfdom because of the social stigma it bore as well as the economic restrictions it entailed. Nor can lords’ actions always be explained by a search for profits. For instance, in 1390 when six unfree tenants from Wingham, Kent, delivered hay and straw to their lord Archbishop Courtney in Canterbury, they did so secretly and on foot to avoid revealing their servile status in public. The archbishop punished them by making them parade round Wingham church carrying sacks of hay and straw, presumably with the aim of humiliating them and publicly affirming their low personal status, even though they had carried out the work required of them.25
Some of the earliest records of lord-peasant tensions, dating from the early decades of the thirteenth century, are cases from the royal courts over whether particular tenants were servile or not. Serfdom was not new in this period, but it was becoming increasingly precisely defined in law as a result of the growth of the royal legal system, access to which was denied to the unfree in matters concerning property. The cases reveal the extent of lordly power over servile tenants: the tenants complained about their land being seized, physical attacks and theft of goods, arson and imprisonment; all carried out by their lord or his agents. For instance, in 1205 an Essex man was assaulted and robbed of ?10 in cash, clothing and jewellery on his way to market, and then thrown into the abbot of Waltham’s jail. His attackers were the abbot’s servants and they denied robbery on the grounds that the man was the abbot’s villein or serf, and thus technically there was no robbery.26 If a victim in a case like this was judged to be a free man, he could have legal remedy in the royal courts, but if he was unfree the case was dismissed: no crime had been committed as he and his property belonged to his lord.
Disputes over status could involve whole manors rather than just individuals. One strategy was to claim the manor was part of the ‘ancient demesne’, land that had belonged to the king at some time in the past. Rents, fines and services owned by tenants on these manors could not be altered, even if the manor had subsequently passed into the hands of another lord. The usual way of attempting to prove ancient demesne status was to appeal to the Domesday Book, which recorded who owned manors just before and after the Norman Conquest. An appeal of ancient demesne required significant organization by villagers including some initial understanding of the laws in these matters and the collection of funds to pay for the case, the hiring of lawyers and travel to London. There are scattered appeals from the midthirteenth century onwards, for instance in 1260 by the tenants of Mickleover, Derbyshire, by the tenants of the Priory of Harmondsworth in 1278, and by the tenants of Ogbourne, Wiltshire, in 1309.27 In 1377 there was a rush of cases involving at least forty manors from Wiltshire, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Devon in what seems to have constituted an organized movement. Alarmed manorial lords petitioned parliament to quash it before peasant aspirations ran out of control. The trouble taken in bringing these cases seems odd considering most were unsuccessful. Yet appeals did occasionally succeed even when the case was far from strong: the tenants of Crondall, Hampshire, who had been disputing their status since at least 1280, had their ancient demesne status recognized in 1364, thus fixing the payments their lord could demand. This manor had not been in royal hands at the time of Domesday, although it had belonged to the king some time in the ninth or early tenth century.28
Tenants also attacked the institution of serfdom from within. One mark of serfdom was the requirement to perform menial labour services as part of rent payments. Historians have long suspected that labour services were performed with a deliberate lack of attention. David Stone has recently proved this was so on the manor of Wisbech Barton. Comparing the labour productivity of workers hired for wages and tenants performing labour services between 1341 and 1389, he found that wage workers were consistently more productive, suggesting that the poor performance of labour services was endemic.29 Poor work was one strategy; outright refusal to perform services also appears to have been surprisingly common. In twenty-one surviving court sessions from Ramsey Abbey between 1279 and 1311, Hilton found 146 ‘separate convictions for the deliberate non-performance of labour services, apart from cases of what may have been equally deliberate cases of bad work’.30 In the St Albans’ manor of Park, groups of tenants failed to perform labour services in 1245, 1265, the 1270s, 1309 and every year between 1318 and 1327. Rather than being individual actions, Faith argues that these were coordinated labour strikes. Poor performance and tenant resistance were perhaps a reason why labour rents were increasingly commuted into money payments in the first half of the fourteenth century.
On some manors, such as Park, tenants fought their lords on a number of fronts. Tenants not only withheld labour services from the abbot of St Albans, but also poached partridges, hares, rabbits and fish in his forests, took timber from his woodland, and used handmills in opposition to his monopoly of milling. The dispute over the use of handmills stretched back as far as the abbey’s surviving manorial records, which begin in 1237. Not only the rural manor of Park but the townspeople of St Albans were in conflict with the abbey over these issues, and during the rebellion of 1381 they united in action, symbolically invading woodland and returning with greenery and a live rabbit, and entering the abbey to break up and distribute the confiscated handmills that had been cemented into the floor of the abbot’s parlour as a sign of his lordly rights.31 In Darnell, Cheshire, in the 1320s and 1330s, tenants of the Abbey of Vale Royal also disputed their lord’s monopoly of milling, as well as denying their servile status and opposing restrictions placed on the leasing of land. They not only went to great lengths to present their case to the king and queen on different instances, but ‘went as far afield as Rutlandshire, in arms, to seek out and attack the abbot and his entourage’.32
The drastic fall in population levels from 1348 onwards as a result of the plague increased the availability of land for those who survived, strengthening tenants’ bargaining power against their lords. There was, however, no immediate weakening of serfdom. In fact, many lords exploited their remaining tenants more heavily as they tried to retain previous levels of manorial revenue. Yet between 1381 and the midfifteenth century serfdom virtually disappeared from England. It was never abolished, and a few people retained hereditary servile status into the sixteenth century, but it was no longer widespread. How, then, had serfdom disappeared? There were three possible routes to freedom, all of which required deliberate action on the part of servile tenants. One was to purchase manumission, official recognition of freedom from one’s lord. Manumission fines were relatively expensive, usually ?10 or ?20 in the fifteenth century. This route was never a common one, perhaps used most often by wealthy individuals who wanted to be sure their bond to a lord was broken. The second route was the renegotiation of land tenure, either by individuals or by groups of tenants. By the early fifteenth century many landholdings lay vacant and lords were increasingly desperate to retain their remaining tenants. Labour services were permanently commuted and servile descriptions removed from tenurial obligations, so that villagers became personally free tenants holding land by customary tenures such as copyhold, as happened for instance on the abbey of Westminster’s manors.33 This occurred quietly on many manors, with little or no comment in the records: lords did not want to make a fuss about the concessions they were offering to tenants, perhaps in the hope they could revive old practices when the economic situation improved.
The third, and most common, route was flight: simply to leave, illegally, the manor in which one was servile and take up land elsewhere on different terms as a free
Tenant. Court rolls from the 1380s to the 1440s show an unusually active land market and high turnover of tenants. Certainly, the fall in population levels opened up new opportunities for the survivors, but this intensity of mobility can only be fully explained if we take into account many ordinary people’s desire to obtain freedom as well as a good landholding. Freedom also brought the right to make flexible economic choices and, as the fifteenth century progressed, only those manors that offered benefits such as low rents, good quality arable land, large areas of common grazing, opportunities to work in rural industry and minimal lordly interference remained fully tenanted. The shortage of tenants placed ordinary people in a strong bargaining position. There were ‘rent strikes’ against particular manorial dues that tenants felt were unfair or unnecessary, such as the fine to recognize a new lord which tenants of the bishop of Worcester withheld in 1433; or money payments for commuted labour services which tenants of the nuns of Syon at Cheltenham refused to pay between 1445 and 1452.34 Similarly, the power of manorial courts was diminished by tenant refusals to pay fines, perform offices or even turn up at court at all. Courts remained important for registering land transfers and regulating village agriculture, both functions which benefited tenants. Lords who refused to lighten payments or restrictions on tenants, and whose manors lay on poor land in out-of-the-way locations, sometimes found that they were left with no tenants at all. Some lords may have emptied villages deliberately to create large-scale sheep or cattle farms. Certainly instances from the 1490s of lords forcefully removing tenants ‘who departed weeping and probably perished’ were reported to the inquiry into rural depopulation led by Cardinal Wolsey in 1517.35 However, the majority of villages deserted in the fifteenth century were vacated voluntarily by tenants or their heirs who hoped to find better opportunities elsewhere.
As the power of manorial lords within the village waned in the fifteenth century, many villages and small towns took an increasing responsibility for managing their own affairs through the creation and enforcement of by-laws which regulated not only agricultural practices but also social behaviour. An increased incidence of fines for breaking by-laws in manorial courts might indicate increased disorder, but can also be seen as a sign of changing patterns of regulation, as ordinary people took on functions of law-keeping that had previously fallen to manorial lords. The rebels of 1381 were unsuccessful in achieving their aims, but a hundred years later the common people of England had not only largely managed to abolish serfdom, but had significantly reduced lordly power, redistributed wealth towards themselves and taken control of important elements of the legal system.
World History
