Life in a Medieval Village

by Frances Gies

  The treatises offered extensive advice on animal husbandry—standards for butter and cheese production, advice on milk versus cheese, on suspension of the milking of cows and ewes to encourage early breeding, on feeding work animals (best for the reeve or hayward to look to, since the oxherd might steal the provender), and on branding the lord’s sheep so that they could be distinguished from those of the tenants. The cowherd should sleep with his animals in the barn, and the shepherd should do the same, with his dog next to him.61

  In the realm of veterinary medicine, the best that can be said is that it was no worse than medieval human medicine. Without giving specific instructions, Walter of Henley advocated making an effort to save animals: “If there be any beast which begins to fall ill, lay out money to better it, for it is said in the proverb, ‘Blessed is the penny that saves two.’ ”62 Probably more practical was Walter’s advice to sell off animals quickly when disease threatened the herd. Verdigris (copper sulfate), mercury, and tar, all items that appear frequently in the Elton manorial accounts, were applied for a variety of animal afflictions, with little effect on the prevailing rate of mortality, averaging 18 percent among sheep.63 Sheep pox, “Red Death,” and murrain were usually blamed, the word “murrain” covering so many diseases that it occurs more often in medieval stock accounts than any other.64

  The Elton dairy produced some two hundred cheeses a year, most if not all from ewes’ milk, with the bulk of the product going to the cellarer of the abbey, some to the famuli and boon-workers.65 Most of the butter was sold, some of the milk used to nurse lambs. The medieval practice of treating ewes as dairy animals may have hindered development of size and stamina. But though notoriously susceptible to disease, sheep were never a total loss since their woolly skins (fells) brought a good price. The relative importance of their fleece caused medieval flocks to have a composition which would seem odd to modern sheep farmers. Where modern sheep are raised mainly for meat and the wethers (males) are slaughtered early, in the Middle Ages the wethers’ superior fleece kept them alive for four to five years.66

  Poultry at Elton, as on most manors, was the province of a dairymaid, who, according to Seneschaucie, ought to be “faithful and of good repute, and keep herself clean, and…know her business.” She should be adept at making and salting cheese, should help with the winnowing, take good care of the geese and hens, and keep and cover the fire in the manor house.67

  The only other agricultural products at Elton were flax, apples, and wax, all cultivated on a modest or insignificant scale.68 The wax was a scanty return on a beekeeping enterprise that failed through a bee disease. On other English manors a variety of garden vegetables, cider, timber, and brushwood were market products. Wine, a major product on the Continent, was a minor one in England.

  In the old days of subsistence agriculture, when the manor’s produce went to feed the manor and the clink of a coin was

  Beehive. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 204.

  seldom heard in the countryside, the surplus of an exceptional season, beyond what everyone could eat, went to waste. But for some time now a momentous change had been under way. The growth of town markets “put most men within the reach of opportunities of buying and selling.”69 The man most affected was the lord, if he awoke to his opportunity. Robert Grosseteste, the practical-minded bishop of Lincoln, urged his readers to ask “how profitable your plow and stock are.”70 Generally the answer was satisfactory. Not only that, but revenue from cash rents was increasing rapidly as the tenants took advantage of the market. One study of central England in 1279 indicates that even the villeins were now paying more than half their dues in money.71 Besides rents, these included a long list of servile fees and the fines of the manorial court. The very number and variety of the lord’s revenues probably helped blind everyone to the inefficiency of the system that supplied them. Like slavery, serfdom required continuous year-round maintenance of a labor force whose labor was needed only in varying degrees in different seasons.

  Hired labor and cash rents were the wave of the future. So was the application of technical improvements. Some lords made an effort. Henry de Bray’s account book records a number of improvements added to his single manor, including building cottages for tenants, widening a stream to provide fish ponds, and constructing a mill and a bridge.72 At Wharram Percy a wholesale reconstruction of the village was executed, evidently a rare seizure of the opportunity afforded a lord by his legal ownership of the village houses and land.73 In the towns such a large-scale project was impossible; over centuries changes were restricted to individual building sites.

  Naive but intelligent Walter of Henley has been credited with pioneering scientific agriculture for his recommendations, admittedly general, for improving seed (“Seed grown on other ground will bring more profit than that which is grown on your own”)74 and breed (“Do not have boars and sows unless of a good breed”).75 The Elton records show evidence of attempts to improve the demesne seed by trading among manors. In 1286-1287 1287, thirty rings of wheat were sent to the reeve of Abbot’s Ripton and twenty received from the reeve of Weston.76 Serieschaucie was more specific than Walter in respect to improving breeds, assigning the cowherd responsibility for choosing large bulls of good pedigree to pasture and mate with the cows.77 Robert Trow-Smith believes the experts were heeded to some extent. Progressive lords such as the Hungerfords of Wiltshire imported rams from Lincolnshire and other regions of England, and Trow-Smith ventures a surmise that “the owners of the great ecclesiastical estates in particular” imported breeding stock from the Continent.78

  Yet the only really widely used device for increasing agricultural production remained the old one of assarting, of enlarging the area of land by cutting down forest or draining marsh. In earlier centuries, when forest and marsh covered the countryside of northwest Europe, a pioneering effort with axe and spade was natural and obvious. Now, in the late thirteenth century, as villages filled the landscape, scope for assarting was disappearing.

  At the same time an opportunity was opening in the booming wool market. Exceeding in volume the demand for grain, meat, leather, and everything else were the purchases by the great merchant-manufacturers of the cloth cities of Flanders, France, and Italy. English wool was especially prized for its fineness, the most sought-after single characteristic of a fiber. Agents of the great wool firms often contracted with a monastic house like Ramsey Abbey for an entire year’s clip, or even several years’ clip, in advance. Prices remained very steady at four to five shillings a stone (1270-1320). The Elton demesne, which delivered 118 fleeces to Ramsey in 1287, in 1314 carted 521 to the abbey.79 Clumsy, fragile, and vulnerable, but easy to feed, easy to handle, and producing its fleece reliably every year, the sheep was on its way to becoming England’s national treasure.

  Appreciative though they were of the wonderful wool market, most lords remained conservative in respect to change, “reluctant to spend heavily from current revenue upon improvements.”80 The most profitable part of the lord’s land was meadow, and the most valuable crop he could raise was hay for winter feed, but on most manors grain remained the top priority. Cereal agriculture retained a mystic prestige among the landholding class as it did, for sounder material reasons, among the peasants.81

  When foreign wool buyers, their eye on long-term investments, insisted that the sheds where fleeces were shorn and stored be given boarded floors, as did a consortium of merchants

  Shepherds watching sheep. British Library, Queen Mary’s Psalter, Ms. Royal 2B VII, f. 74.

  Donkey carrying woolsacks to market. Bodleian Library, Ms. Ashmole 1504, f. 30.

  from Cahors in dealing with the Cistercian abbey of Pipewell, the abbey gave in and boarded the floors, but that was as far as the lord cared to go in welcoming improvement.82 The historic shift in British agriculture marked by the enclosure movement got under way, very slowly, only in the fifteenth century.

  Content to see their revenues rise and their lu
xuries multiply, most lords preferred to assure themselves of all that was coming to them under the system rather than striving to improve the system. Manorial custom still ruled the countryside, its authority fortified by the new commitment to the written record, and neither lord nor peasant was sufficiently dissatisfied to press for change. The lord counted on custom to bring laborers to his fields, coins to his coffers, and poultry, cheese, meat, and ale to his table. The villager relied on custom to limit his services and payments, and to guarantee him his house, his croft, his strips of arable, and his grazing rights.

  4

  THE VILLAGERS:

  WHO THEY WERE

  THREE CONSIDERATIONS GOVERNED THE CONDItion of the Elton villager: his legal status (free versus unfree), his wealth in land and animals, and (related to the first two criteria but independent of them) his social standing. How the villagers interacted has only recently drawn attention from historians. Earlier, the peasant’s relationship with his lord dominated scholarly investigation. This “manorial aspect” of the peasant’s life overshadowed the “village aspect,” which, however, is older and more fundamental, the village being older than the manor. The fact that information about the village is harder to come by than information about the manor in no way alters this conclusion. The manor has been described historically as “a landowning and land management grid superimposed on the settlement patterns of villages and hamlets.”1

  Both village and manor played their part in the peasant’s life. The importance of the manor’s role depended on the peasant’s status as a free man or villein, a distinction for which the lawyers strove to find a clear-cut criterion. Henry de Bracton, leading jurist of the thirteenth century, laid down the principle, “Omnes homines aut liberi sunt aut servi” (All men are either free or servile).2 Bracton and his colleagues sought to fit the villein into Roman law, and in doing so virtually identified him as a slave. Neat though that correspondence might be in legal theory, it did not work in practice. Despite their de jure unfree status, many villeins succeeded de facto in appropriating the privileges of freedom. They bought, sold, bequeathed, and inherited property, including land. Practical need created custom, and custom overrode Roman legal theory.

  Back at the time of the Domesday survey, the English villein was actually catalogued among the free men, “the meanest of the free,” according to Frederic Maitland, ranking third among the five tiers of peasantry: liberi homines (free men); sokemen; villeins; cotters or bordars, equivalent to the serfs of the Continent; and slaves, employed on the lord’s land as laborers and servants.3 In the century after Domesday, slaves disappeared in England, by a process that remains obscure, apparently evolving into either manorial servants or villein tenants. But meanwhile by an equally obscure process the villein slipped down into the category of the unfree. Historians picture a series of pendulum swings in peasant status reflecting large external economic shifts, especially the growth of the towns as markets for agricultural produce. R. H. Hilton believes that the new heavy obligations were imposed on the English villein mainly in the 1180s and 1190s.4

  The unfreedom of the villein or serf was never a generalized condition, like slavery, but always consisted of specific disabilities: he owed the lord substantial labor services; he was subject to a number of fines or fees, in cash or in kind; and he was under the jurisdiction of the lord’s courts. In Maitland’s words, the serf, or villein, remained “a free man in relation to all men other than his lord.”5

  The very concepts of “free” and “unfree” involved a tangle of legal subtleties. On the Continent, nuances of freedom and servility developed early, and with them an array of Latin terms for the unfree: mancipium, servus, colonics, lidus, collibertus, nativus.6 In England, terminology became even more complicated. The variety of nomenclature in Domesday Book, which derived in part from regional patterns of settlement, multiplied in the two subsequent centuries to a point where in Cambridgeshire in 1279 villagers were described by twenty different terms, some meaning essentially the same thing, some indicating slight differences. A few miles north, in southern Lincolnshire, eight more designations appeared. To what Edward Miller and John Hatcher call a “positive jungle of rules governing social relationships” was added the fact that land itself was classified as free or villein, meaning that it owed money rents or labor services. Originally villein tenants had held villein land, but by the thirteenth century many villeins held some free land and many free men some villein land.7

  But if legal status was clouded by complexity, economic status tended to be quite clear, visible, and tangible: one held a certain number of acres and owned a certain number of cattle and sheep. Georges Duby, speaking of the Continent, observes, “Formerly class distinctions had been drawn according to hereditary and juridical lines separating free men from unfree, but by 1300 it was a man’s economic condition which counted most.”8 In England the shift was perhaps a little slower, but unmistakably in the same direction. A rich villein was a bigger man in the village than a poor free man.

  In the relations among villagers, what might be called the sociology of the village, much remains obscure, but much can be learned through analysis of the rolls of the manorial courts, which recorded not only enforcement of manorial obligations but interaction among the villagers, their quarrels, litigation, marriages, inheritance, sale and purchase of land, economic activities, and crimes.

  Just at this moment a major aid in identification of individuals and families of villagers made its historic appearance: the introduction of surnames. A survey of Elton of about 1160 included in the Ramsey Abbey cartulary and listing current tenants, their fathers, and their grandfathers, gives only a handful of surnames. Where these occur they are taken from place of origin (Ralph of Asekirche, Ralph of Walsoken, Gilbert of Newton); from occupation (Thurold Priest [Presbyter], Thomas Clerk [Clericus], Gilbert Reeve [Praepositus], Ralph Shoemaker [Sutor]); or from paternity (Richard son of Reginald). But most of the villagers are listed only by their first names: Walter, Thomas, Ralph, Roger, Robert, Edward.9

  A century later, manorial court rolls and a royal survey attach surnames to nearly all the Elton tenants. Some are in Latin, like the given names, some simply in English: Robertus ad Crucem (Robert at the Cross) and Henricus Messor (Henry Hayward), but lohannes Page (John Page), Henricus Wollemonger (Henry Woolmonger), and Robertus Chapman (whose Old English name, meaning merchant, is cited in Latin elsewhere in the records as Robertus Mercator). Often it is difficult to tell whether the Latin represents a true surname or merely a trade or office: thus “Henricus Faber” may be Henry Smith; or he may be Henry the smith, and may be mentioned elsewhere in the records as Henry son of Gilbert, or Henry atte Water, or Henry of Barnwell. John Dunning’s son who left the village and became a tanner at Hayham is always referred to as “John Tanner.”

  Nearly all surnames derived from the same three sources: parental (or grandparental) Christian names; occupations, offices, or occasionally legal status; and places, either of origin or in the village. In the first category are the Fraunceys family, possibly deriving from a “Franceis” in the twelfth-century survey who held a virgate and six acres; the Goscelins; the Blundels (in the twelfth century a Blundel held three virgates); the Benyts (Benedicts); the Huberts; and numerous names prefaced by “son of” (Alexander son of Gilbert, Nicholas son of Henry, Robert son of John). In a few cases villagers are identified by their mothers’ first names: William son of Letitia, Agnes daughter of Beatrice. J. A. Raftis in his study of the village of Warboys observed that surnames derived from parental Christian names gradually dropped the “son of” and became simply Alexander Gilbert, Nicholas Henry, Robert John. Finally, in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the “son” sometimes reappeared as a suffix: Johnson, Jameson, Williamson.10

  In the category of occupations and offices, Elton names included Miller, Smith, Shoemaker, Carter, Carpenter, Chapelyn, Comber, Cooper, Dyer, Webster (weaver), Chapman (merchant), Shepherd, Tanner, Walker, Woolmonger, Bax
ter (baker), Tailor, Painter, Freeman, Hayward, and Beadle. No fewer than eight men in the court rolls in the last two decades of the thirteenth century bear the name Reeve, three in one court roll, and one man is given the name (in English) of Reeveson.

  The category of names indicating origin usually derived from villages in the immediate vicinity of Elton: Warmington, Morburn, Water Newton, Stanground, and Alwalton; Barnwell, Keyston, and Brington to the south; Barton in Bedfordshire; Clipsham in Lincolnshire; and Marholm, northwest of Peterborough. Surnames that derived from the part of the village where the family lived mix Latin and English, and occasionally French: Abovebrook, Ad Portam (at the gate), Ad Pontem (at the bridge), Ad Furnam (at the oven), atte (at the) Brook, atte Water, atte Well, Ordevill (hors de ville or Extra Villam, outside the village), In Venella (in the lane), In Angulo (in the nook or corner), Ad Ripam (at the riverbank). In time these were smoothed and simplified into plain Brooks, Gates, Bridges, Lane, Banks, Atwater, or Atwell.

  A few Elton surnames seem to have come from personal characteristics or obscurely derived nicknames: L’Hermite (the hermit), Prudhomme (wise man), le Wyse, Child, Hering, Saladin, Blaccalf, Le Long, Le Rus. One family was named Peppercorn, one Mustard.*

  Evidence suggests that village society everywhere was stratified into three classes. The lowest held either no land at all or too little to support a family. The middle group worked holdings of a half virgate to a full virgate. A half virgate (12 to 16 acres) sufficed to feed father, mother, and children in a good season; a full virgate supplied a surplus to redeem a villein obligation or even purchase more land. At the top of the hierarchy was a small class of comparatively large peasant landholders, families whose 40, 50, or even 100 acres might in a few generations raise them to the gentry, though at present they might be villeins.