The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Read online

  When the sowing and reaping had been done there was always much other work to do. Every year there were hedges to cut and ditches to clear, draining to do, animals to look after, gardens to hoe, wood to cut, and assarts to cultivate. Assarts were pieces of forest waste which had been converted into arable land by cutting down the trees and grubbing up the brushwood, the peasant having either paid an agreed rent to the lord or a fine – in the case of royal forests a fine to the king – for having done so without permission. Once in possession of an assart the peasant would cultivate it in his own way whenever he had time to do so.

  Finding time was always a problem for him, since most serfs were bound to work for their lords on many days every year. They were kept to their tasks by overseers carrying white wands of office in their hands, by haywards whose duty it was to supervise the pasture and the work of the harvest, by the beadle who was there to make sure there was no trouble and to deal with it if there were, and by the reeve, the manorial official who was ultimately responsible for the serfs. As a man appointed from their kind, the reeve knew all the serfs and, as a trusted servant of his master, was generally well rewarded for his arduous task. The serfs, too, were rewarded when the hayward’s horn sounded and their day’s work was done. Already at noon, on those days when they were required to work until dusk, a midday meal of bread and cheese and ale, better no doubt than any they tasted at home, had been brought out to them from the manor. In the evenings they sat down at trestle tables in a courtyard or outhouse and were provided with more bread and ale, and, on occasions to be remembered, with roast meat and as much cheese as they wanted. After the last day of the harvest on some manors a sheep was let loose among the serfs and, provided it remained in the field with them, was deemed to be theirs. On other manors each man was allowed to approach a large haycock and carry off as big a bundle as he could balance on his scythe.

  Hard as their lives so often were, many, if not most, peasants had other customary rights which made existence more endurable. They had use of the common meadows, known as Lammas lands, once the crop on them had been gathered; and, when their turn came round or they drew an entitling lot in the shape of a specially marked apple or piece of wood, they could grow a crop on part of the meadows themselves. They also had rights over the waste lands where they could pasture their animals and gather timber for use as fuel, for repairs to their cottages and for the construction of their tools and household utensils. They were usually allowed to gather not only wood that had fallen to the ground, but as much as they could pull down or knock off trees ‘by hook or by crook’. They might also be allowed to cut turf for banking or roofing, to dig out gravel for building, to gather bracken for their animals’ litter or for their own bedding, to pick nuts, berries and wild fruit, or even to fell a certain number of trees, though customs varied from village to village and from manor to manor. These two terms were not necessarily the same, since a manor might extend over several villages while a village might belong to two or more different manors. The rights of one villager might well, therefore, not be the same as his near neighbours’.6

  The villagers’ rights almost never extended, however, to the trapping of animals in the forest. Poaching nevertheless seems to have been practised continuously on the most widespread scale. Countless birds were netted and rabbits snared; and the more daring peasant would emerge from the thickets having trapped and speared a deer or a wild boar. The rivers, too, were a plentiful source of supply for the villagers’ cooking pots. Eels were trapped at night; and, from time to time, a salmon would be smuggled beneath a peasant’s smock into the concealing gloom of his cottage.

  Sir, for God’s sake do not take it ill of me if I tell thee the truth [a peasant charged with poaching explained in a manorial court]. I went the other evening along the bank of this pond and looked at the fish which were playing in the water, so beautiful and so bright, and for the great desire I had for a tench I laid me down on the bank and just with my hands quite simply, and without any other device, I caught that tench and carried it off; and now I will tell thee the cause of my covetousness and my desire. My dear wife had lain abed a right full month, as my neighbours who are here know, and she could never eat or drink anything to her liking, and for the great desire she had to eat a tench I went to the bank of the pond to take just one tench; and that never other fish from the pond did I take.7

  Another poacher here describes the pleasures of the illicit chase:

  In May, when there are many things to enjoy, and in the summer season when airs are soft, I went to the wood to take my luck, and in among the shaws to get a shot at hart or hind, as it should happen. And as I stood in that place the idea of stalking came to me, so I covered both body and bow with leaves, turned in behind a tree and waited there awhile. And as I gazed in the glade near by me I saw a hart with tall antlers: the main stem was unburnished and in the middle very strong. And he was full grown and adorned with horns and large, broad and big of body: whoever might catch him, he was a dish for a king.

  I let the leash fall to the ground quietly, and settled down my hound by the bole of a birch tree, and took careful note of the wind from the fluttering of the leaves. I stalked on very quietly so as to break no twigs, and crept to a crab-apple tree and hid underneath it.

  Then I wound up my bow and prepared to shoot, I had to stand without moving and to stir no foot, although gnats grievously troubled me and bit my eyes, for if I had tried to move, or made any sign, all my sport, that I had so long awaited, would have been lost. The hart paused, went on cautiously, staring here and there, but at last he bent down and began on his feed. Then I hauled to the hook [the trigger of the cross-bow] and smote the hart. It so happened that I hit him behind the left shoulder and the blood streamed out on both sides. He stopped: brayed and then brushed through the thickets, as if everything in the wood had crashed down at the same moment. I went to my hound, and quickly grasped him and untied his leash, and let him cast about. The briars and the bracken were smeared with blood, and the hound picked up the scent and pursued the hart to where he was, for he had crept into a cave, and, crouched to the earth, had fallen down – dead as a door-nail.8

  The prizes of a poaching expedition were considered by the peasant fair compensation for the manifold services and hardships which his lord imposed upon him. For there was not only work to be done on the lord’s demesne, regular ‘week-works’ and occasional ‘boons’, there were all manner of payments to be made for what were considered the serf’s privileges. He might be asked to pay a tax known as wood-penny for the right to pick up wood; he might be required to take a basket of eggs to the manor house in recognition of his being allowed to keep hens; he might be asked to pay the lord a proportion of the proceeds on the sale of a cow; and when he died he would probably be liable for heriot which entailed giving up his best beast or most valuable chattel, a relic of the days when a man’s weapons of war, his horse and harness – his heregeatwa was the Old English word – had to be returned to his lord upon his death. The serf might also be liable for tallage, a tax, later usually of a fixed amount calculated on the basis of what a man could afford to pay, but often originally an arbitrary demand at the discretion of the lord. This, so a respected thirteenth-century professor of divinity decided, the serfs were bound to pay, since they and their possessions were the property of their master or, as the lord of a monastic estate once put it more crudely, serfs owned nothing but their own bellies.

  Then there were many limitations placed upon the serf’s personal freedom: he could not leave the manor without permission, nor give his daughter in marriage without payment nor send his son to school without leave. He was not allowed to bake his own bread, even if he could have done so without bringing his cottage down about his ears in flames, but had to use the oven belonging to the lord. Yet more resented than this, because he could easily have done it at home – more resented even than the doves that clattered out of the lord’s dovecote to fatten themselves for the lord’s tabl
e at the expense of the peasants’ crops – was the obligation imposed upon the serf to have his corn ground at a mill belonging to the lord and run by one of his servants, or by his tenant, the miller.

  Mills, usually watermills but, after their first appearance in England towards the end of the twelfth century, sometimes windmills, were a hated feature of the countryside; and the miller was often a detested character, blamed alike for cheating those who were bound to use his services, for grumpily dealing out ill-ground meal, for rigorously supervising the collection of multure – that proportion of grain that had to be contributed either to himself or to the lord as an additional profit – and for delays that were not always his fault and might be caused by a breakdown of his machinery, or by drought or a windless day that left his wheels and sails motionless. Chaucer provides a portrait of a miller that any mediaeval peasant would quickly have recognized:

  The Miller was a chap of sixteen stone,

  A great stout fellow big in brawn and bone.

  He did well out of them, for he could go

  And win the ram at any wrestling show.

  Broad, knotty and short-shouldered, he would boast

  He could heave any door off hinge and post,

  Or take a run and break it with his head.

  His beard, like any sow or fox, was red

  And broad as well, as though it were a spade;

  And, at its very tip, his nose displayed

  A wart on which there stood a tuft of hair

  Red as the bristles in an old sow’s ear.

  His nostrils were as black as they were wide.

  He had a sword and buckler at his side,

  His mighty mouth was like a furnace door.

  A wrangler and buffoon, he had a store

  Of tavern stories, filthy in the main.

  His was a master-hand at stealing grain.

  He felt it with his thumb and thus he knew

  Its quality and took three times his due.9

  There were, of course, honest millers, just as there were forbearing and lenient lords. While there are records of lords confiscating private handmills – the Abbot of St Albans used the stones from them to pave his parlour floor – there are records, too, of mere token fines being levied for their use. The severity with which heriot was enforced depended, too, upon local custom and the character of the lord. Some lords did not claim heriot at all when the serf had little to offer; and Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the late twelfth century, tells a story of St Hugh of Lincoln who ‘was so utterly uncovetous of earthly things’ that, when his servants had carried off the ox of a certain dead peasant, he ordered it to be restored to the widow when she came to him in tears, begging for mercy.

  Hereupon the steward of the manor said unto him, ‘My Lord, if you remit this and other similar perquisites, you will never be able to keep your land.’ But Hugh, hearing this, leapt straight down from his horse to the ground, which in that spot was deep in mire; and grasping both hands full of mud, he said, ‘Now I hold my land, and none the less do I remit to this poor woman her ox.’ Then, casting away the mud and looking upwards, he added, ‘For I seek not to cling to earth beneath but to heaven above. This woman had but two workfellows. Death hath robbed her of the better and shall we rob her of the other? God forbid that we should be so grasping.’10

  Many, if not most lords were grasping, however, and quite ready to take advantage of a manorial custom which might allow them to seize far more than the usual best beast or most valuable chattel. Sometimes a full third of a dead man’s assets had to be surrendered. On the manor of Hedenham, whose lord was the Bishop of Rochester, custom allowed him to compel the sale of an animal if that was all the widow had to offer and to share the proceeds with her; and on the manor of Barchester a reeve was ordered to take into the hands of the lord the land of a widow who could not afford to keep it once her cow and her ox had been seized. On another manor the customs were so exceptionally severe as to decree that:

  … when any [bondman] dieth, the lord shall have all the pigs of the deceased, all his goats, all his mares at grass, and his horse (if he had one for his personal use), all his bees, all his bacon-pigs, all his cloth of wool and flax, and whatever can be found of gold and silver. The lord shall also have all his brass pots … because the lord ought to have all things of metal.11

  Although such harsh customs were very rare, and apparently interpreted without too strict a regard for their very letter, there can be no doubt that a death in the family was usually an expensive and occasionally a ruinous calamity. It may be true that the sorry lot of the early medieval peasant has sometimes been exaggerated, and that starvation and famine were not common, yet at times in some parts of the country peasants could no doubt be seen struggling piteously to survive like the poor couple described by Langland:

  As I went by the way, weeping for sorrow, I saw a poor man hanging on to the plough. His coat was of a coarse stuff which was called cary; his hood was full of holes and his hair stuck out of it. As he trod the soil his toes peered out of his worn shoes with their thick soles; his hose hung about his hocks on all sides, and he was all bedaubed with mud as he followed the plough. He had two mittens, made scantily of rough stuff, with worn-out fingers and thick with muck. This man bemired himself in the mud almost to the ancle, and drove four heifers before him that had become feeble, so that men might count their every rib so sorry looking they were.

  His wife walked beside him with a long goad in a shortened cotehardy looped up full high and wrapped in a winnowing-sheet to protect her from the weather. She went barefoot on the ice so that the blood flowed. And at the end of the row lay a little crumb-bowl, and therein a little child covered with rags, and two two-year-olds were on the other side, and they all sang one song that was pitiful to hear: they all cried the same cry – a miserable note. The poor man sighed sorely, and said ‘Children be still.’12

  The wife working beside her husband in the fields, the daughter beside her father, or the single woman harrowing on her own were not uncommon sights. Women were more often to be found cooking and gardening, brewing ale, milking the cows or feeding the pigs, looking after the poultry or winnowing the grain. But their capacity to do such heavy work as driving plough oxen and breaking stones for road-mending was never doubted; and they were apparently in general rewarded at the same rate as their male counterparts. Female servants usually received less than men; but female reapers and binders at Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, in 1380 received the men’s daily rate of 4d, while female thatchers at Avenham nearby were being paid the same as men.13 Indeed, compared with the ladies of the manor, peasant women enjoyed a certain independence; and, while they did not sit on juries and were not considered eligible as stewards or reeves, they were regarded as fully capable of taking over their husbands’ holdings.

  Prejudices against women as a sex existed, of course, since they were, after all, the descendants of Eve as well as sisters to the mother of God; and English manorial custom preferred succession of a holding to a male rather than a female heir. Yet daughters and widows did inherit and, although pressure was put upon them to marry or remarry as soon as possible, many of them continued to hold their land even though no marriage took place. An analysis of a number of family holdings in the West Midlands between 1350 and 1450 shows that, apart from those which came into the hands of the lord and were subsequently reissued outside the families, over 60 per cent went to female heiresses, nearly all widows.14

  Both widows and widowers as well as bachelors were, however, under constant pressure to remarry as the lord was anxious to maintain the amount of labour he needed for the farming of his demesne. On the manor of Hales in 1274, for example, John of Romsey and Nicholas Sewal were ‘given till next court to decide as to the widows offered them’. In 1279 on the same manor Thomas of Oldbury was ordered to take one Agatha of Halesowen to wife. He said he would rather be fined; and as he could find no guarantors for the fine he was ordered to be distrained. On the mano
r of Brightwaltham in 1335 as many as six widows who had come into their husbands’ holdings without being able to provide the labour that was due, were each ordered to provide themselves with husbands if they wished to keep their land.15

  Remarriage did, however, present problems. Few difficulties were encountered when the widow’s new husband came from the same manor, as both parties would remain the property of the lord and so would any children they might have. But a marriage outside the manor which entailed the loss of property to one lord or the other was a different matter, and in these cases a fine would have to be paid. These fines were sometimes extremely heavy. On the Worcester Cathedral estate in the fourteenth century they could be as high as 13s 4d, the equivalent of about six weeks’ wages. Other estates, however, were more lenient. In the 1350s Gloucester Abbey generally charged between 3s and 5s; and in 1356 a woman from Pattingham in Staffordshire was fined the relatively modest sum of 3s 4d for permission to leave the manor, though she would, no doubt, have been charged more had she not been so old and feeble.16

  Fines were also imposed for fornication and adultery. These offences were really a matter for the Church; but the lord was concerned in them not only because a fine paid to the Church by the serf was so much loss to himself but also because unchastity might well depreciate the value of a bondswoman and this was his loss, too. So the lord ensured that fines were imposed upon those guilty of sexual offences whether or not the Church was involved in the case; and the culprits, both men and women, were liable to be flogged and put in the stocks as well as excommunicated.