by Frances Gies
Village life for men and women alike was busy, strenuous, unrelenting, much of it lived outdoors, with an element of danger that especially threatened children. Diet was poor, dress simple, housing primitive, sanitary arrangements derisory. Yet there were love, sex, courtship, and marriage, holidays, games and sports, and plenty of ale. Neighbors quarreled and fought, sued and countersued, suspected and slandered, but also knew each other thoroughly and depended on each other, to help with the plowing and harvesting, to act as pledges, to bear witness, to respond when danger threatened.
The most arresting characteristic of the medieval open field village is certainly its system of cooperation: cultivation in concert of individually held land, and pasturing in common of individually owned animals. It was a system that suited an age of low productivity and scarcity of markets, and one that hardly fostered the spirit of innovation. The lords were content to leave things as they were, the villeins had little power to change them. When change came, it came largely from outside, from the pressure of the market and the enterprise of new landlords. Yet change builds on an existing structure. The open field village helped create the populous—and in comparison with the past, prosperous—Europe of the high Middle Ages, the Europe from which so much of the modern world emerged.
In the shift toward that world, many villagers lost their homes, many of their villages disappeared. Argument, protest, and violence accompanied change, which only historical perspective makes clearly inevitable.
Was something larger lost? A sense of community, of closeness, of mutual solidarity? Perhaps it was, but the clearest message about the people of Elton and other villages of the late thirteenth century that their records give us seems to be that they were people much like ourselves. Not brutes or dolts, but men and women, living out their lives in a more difficult world, one underequipped with technology, devoid of science, nearly devoid of medicine, and saddled with an exploitative social system. Sometimes they protested, sometimes they even rose in rebellion, mostly they adapted to circumstance. In making their system work, they helped lay the foundation of the future.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: ELTON
1. Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, ed. by W. Duncan Macray, London, 1886, p. 135.
2. Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, eds., Deserted Medieval Villages, London, 1971; Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of the Middle Ages, London, 1954; John G. Hurst, “The Changing Medieval Village,” in J. A. Raftis, ed., Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Toronto, 1981; Trevor Rowley and John Wood, Deserted Villages, Aylesbury, England, 1982.
CHAPTER 1. THE VILLAGE EMERGES
1. Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086-1348, London, 1978, pp. 85-87.
2. Rowley and Wood, Deserted Villages, pp. 6-8.
3. Jean Chapelot and Robert Fossier, The Village and House in the Middle Ages, trans. by Henry Cleere, Berkeley, 1985, p. 327.
4. P. J. Fowler, “Later Prehistory,” in H. P. R. Finberg, gen. ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 1, pt. 1, Prehistory, ed. by Stuart Piggott, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 157-158.
5. Butser Ancient Farm Project Publications: The Celtic Experience; Celtic Fields; Evolution of Wheat; Bees and Honey; Quern Stones; Hoes, Ards, and Yokes; Natural Dyes.
6. Tacitus, De Vita Iulii Agricola and De Germania, ed. by Alfred Gudeman, Boston, 1928, pp. 36-37, 40-41.
7. Chapelot and Fossier, Village and House, pp. 27-30.
8. S. Applebaum, “Roman Britain,” in H. P. R. Finberg, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 1, pt. 2, A.D. 43-1042, Cambridge, 1972, p. 117.
9. Ibid., pp. 73-82.
10. Ibid., pp. 186, 208.
11. Chapelot and Fossier, Village and House, pp. 61, 100-103.
12. Ibid., p. 26.
13. Ibid., p. 15.
14. Ibid., pp. 144-150.
15. Joan Thirsk, “The Common Fields” and “The Origin of the Common Fields,” and J. Z. Titow, “Medieval England and the Open-Field System,” in Peasants, Knights, and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History, ed. by R. H. Hilton, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 10-56; Bruce Campbell, “Commonfield Origins—the Regional Dimension,” in Trevor Rowley, ed., Origins of Open-Field Agriculture, London, 1981, p. 127; Trevor Rowley, “Medieval Field Systems,” in Leonard Cantor, ed., The English Medieval Landscape, Philadelphia, 1982; H. L. Gray, English Field Systems, Cambridge, Mass., 1915; C. S. and C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields, Oxford, 1954.
16. Joseph and Frances Gies, Life in a Medieval Castle, New York, 1974, p. 148.
17. George C. Homans, English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century, New York, 1975, pp. 12-28.
18. Grenville Astill and Annie Grant, eds., The Countryside of Medieval England, Oxford, 1988, pp. 88, 94.
19. Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, Columbia, S.C., 1968, pp. 109-111.
20. Joan Thirsk, “Farming Techniques,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4, 1500-1640, ed. by Joan Thirsk, Cambridge, 1967, p. 164.
21. R. H. Hilton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London, 1984, pp. 15-16.
22. W. G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village, London, 1957, p. 79; Homans, English Villagers, p. 368.
CHAPTER 2. THE ENGLISH VILLAGE: ELTON
1. For Huntingdonshire: Peter Bigmore, The Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire Landscape, London, 1979. For England in general: H. C. Darby, A New Historical Geography of England Before 1600, Cambridge, 1976; Cantor, ed., The English Medieval Landscape; W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, London, 1955.
2. Applebaum, “Roman Britain,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 53.
3. Bigmore, Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire Landscape, pp. 37-42.
4. Frank M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, 1971, p. 25.
5. H. C. Darby, “The Anglo-Scandinavian Foundations,” in Darby, ed., New Historical Geography, pp. 13-14.
6. Ibid., p. 15.
7. H. P. R. Finberg, “Anglo-Saxon England to 1042,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 422.
8. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, trans. by Anne Savage, London, 1983, pp. 90-92, 96.
9. J. A. Raftis, The Estates of Ramsey Abbey: A Study of Economic Growth and Organization, Toronto, 1957, pp. 6-9.
10. A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire, London, 1926, pp. 183-184; James B.Johnston, The Place Names of England and Wales, London, 1915, p. 258; Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names, Oxford, 1947, p. 158.
11. Chronicon abbatiae Rameseiensis, pp. 112-113.
12. Ibid., pp. 135-140.
13. E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century, Oxford, 1956, p. 73.
14. Cartularium monasterii de Rameseia, ed. by William Hart, London, 1884-1893, vol. 1, p. 234. (Henceforth referred to as Cart. Rames.)
15. Barbara Dodwell, “Holdings and Inheritance in East Anglia,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 20 (1967), p. 55.
16. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, pp. 26-34.
17. Susan B. Edgington, “Ramsey Abbey vs. Pagan Peverel, St. Ives, 1107,” Records of Huntingdonshire 2 (1985), pp. 2-5; Edgington, “Pagan Peverel: An Anglo-Norman Crusader,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. by P. Edbury, Cardiff, 1985, pp. 90-93.
18. H. C. Darby, “Domesday England,” in Darby, ed., New Historical Geography, p. 39.
19. W. Page and G. Proby, eds., Victoria History of the Counties of England: Huntingdonshire, vol. 1, London, 1926, p. 344. (Henceforth referred to as V.C.H. Hunts.)
20. Rotuli Hundredorum temp. Hen. III et Edw. I in Turn Lond’ et in curia receptae scaccarii Westm. asservati, London, 1818, vol. 2, p. 656. (Henceforth referred to as Rot. Hund.)
21. Beresford, Lost Villages, p. 55.
22. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, Oxford
, 1961, pp. 27-28, 37.
23. R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands and the End of the Thirteenth Century, New York, 1966, p. 95; Hoskins, The Midland Peasant, p. 284; Chapelot and Fossier, Village and House, pp. 253-254, 296-302; Margaret Wood, The English Mediaeval House, London, 1965, pp. 215-216; Maurice W. Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage, London, 1961, pp. 22-25; H. M. Colvin, “Domestic Architecture and Town-Planning,” in A. Lane Poole, ed., Medieval England, London, 1958, vol. 1, pp. 82-88.
24. Wood, English Mediaeval House, p. 293.
25. Chapelot and Fossier, Village and House, pp. 313-315; Sarah M. McKinnon, “The Peasant House: The Evidence of Manuscript Illuminations,” in Raftis, ed., Pathways to Medieval Peasants, p. 304; Colvin, “Domestic Architecture,” p. 87.
26. Hurst, “The Changing Medieval Village,” pp. 42-43; Beresford and Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages, pp. 104-105; Hilton, A Medieval Society, p. 97.
27. Bedfordshire Coroners’ Rolls, ed. by R. F. Hunnisett, Streatley, England, 1969, pp. 8, 35,45, 83, 92, 112-113.
28. Elton Manorial Records, 1279-1351, ed. by S. C. Ratcliff, trans, by D. M. Gregory, Cambridge, 1946, p. 152. (Henceforth referred to as E.M.R.)
29. Ibid., pp. 392, 393.
30. Hilton, A Medieval Society, p. 95.
31. Beresford and Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages, p. 116.
32. E.M.R., pp. 196, 300, 316; Grenville Astill, “Rural Settlement, the Toft and the Croft,” in Astill and Grant, eds., Countryside of Medieval England, pp. 36-61.
33. E.M.R., p. 52.
34. Ibid., pp. 52, 370.
35. Ibid., p. 52.
36. Ibid., pp. 50, 82, 110.
37. Rot. Hund., p. 656; Leslie E. Webster and John Cherry, “Medieval Britain in 1977,” Medieval Archaeology 22 (1978), pp. 142, 178.
38. E.M.R., pp. 22, 66, 275.
39. Ibid., pp. 13, 79, 214.
40. Ibid., pp. 137, 138, 169, 275, 322, 323, 336.
41. Ibid., p. 213.
42. Ibid., pp. 21, 64, 138, 169, 170, 215, 386.
43. Ibid., pp. 65, 66, 80, 169, 174, 176, 185, 322, 323.
44. Ibid., pp. 14, 22, 137, 386.
45. Ibid., pp. 14, 137, 138, 139, 323.
46. Ibid., pp. 137, 138, 168, 214, 371.
47. Ibid., p. 169.
48. Ibid., pp. 137, 213, 214, 272, 288.
49. Ibid., pp. 52, 77-78.
50. Ibid., p. 112.
51. Ibid., pp. 10, 19, 57, 126, 158, 203, 266-267.
52. Ibid., p. li.
53. Brian K. Roberts, The Making of the English Village, a Study in Historical Geography, Harlow, England, 1987, pp. 21-29; Chapelot and Fossier, Village and House, p. 184.
54. Hilton, A Medieval Society, pp. 93-95.
55. E.M.R., p. 69.
56. Rot. Hund., pp. 656-658.
57. Hilton, A Medieval Society, p. 92.
58. E.M.R., p. 97.
59. Rot. Hund., p. 657.
CHAPTER 3. THE LORD
1. The Estate Book of Henry de Bray, Northamptonshire, c. 1289-1340, ed. by D. Willis, Camden Society 3rd ser. 27 (1916).
2. Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 17.
3. R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, Oxford, 1975, pp. 132-133.
4. Homans, English Villagers, pp. 330-331.
5. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 77; R. Lennard, Rural England, 1086-1135, a Study of Society and Agrarian Conditions, Oxford, 1959, p. 199.
6. Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1548, Cambridge, 1980, p. 55; Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life, p. 35.
7. Kosminsky, Studies in Agrarian History, Table 3, p. 100; Cart. Rames., vol. 1, pp. 294, 306.
8. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, pp. 68-69.
9. E.M.R., p. 117.
10. Ibid., pp. 193, 299.
11. Ibid., p. 45.
12. Ibid., p. 46.
13. Ellen W. Moore, The Fairs of Medieval England: An Introductory Study, Toronto, 1985.
14. Cart. Rames., vol. 2, p. 342.
15. George Homans, “The Rural Sociology of Medieval England,” Past and Present 4 (1953), p. 39.
16. Ibid., p. 40.
17. Walter of Henley’s Husbandry, Together with an Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie, etc., ed. by E. Lamond, Oxford, 1890, p. 35.
18. Ibid. (Rules of St. Robert), p. 125.
19. Ibid. (Seneschaucie), pp. 88—89; Frances Davenport, The Economic Development of a ‘Norfolk Manor, 1086-2565, Cambridge, 1906, pp. 22-23.
20. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), p. 105.
21. E.M.R., p. xviii.
22. E.M.R., p. 173; Davenport, Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor, p. 23.
23. Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, pp. 192-193.
24. Walter of Henley, p. 11.
25. E.M.R., pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.
26. Ibid., pp. 2, 4, 138, 272, 275, 386.
27. Ibid., pp. 67-68, 140-141, 276-277.
28. Ibid., pp. 13, 67.
29. Ibid., p. 63.
30. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), p. 99.
31. Homans, English Villagers, pp. 297-305; Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life, p. 233; Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, pp. 125-127; Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, pp. 193-197.
32. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), pp. 100-102.
33. E.M.R., pp. 56-85.
34. Ibid., p. 15.
35. Ibid., p. 24.
36. Ibid., p. 68.
37. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 95.
38. Nigel Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life, Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280-1400, Oxford, 1987, p. 127.
39. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by F. N. Robinson, Boston, 1933, p. 25 (lines 593-594).
40. Walter of Henley, pp. 17-18.
41. J. S. Drew, “Manorial Accounts of St. Swithun’s Priory, Winchester,” in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, London, 1962, pp. 27-30.
42. Walter of Henley, p. 11.
43. Homans, English Villagers, p. 293.
44. E.M.R., pp. 70, 79, 278, 373.
45. Walter of Henley (Rules of St. Robert), p. 145.
46. Cart. Rames., vol. 3, pp. 168-169, 230-232.
47. Paul Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, London, 1911; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, p. 67.
48. M. M. Postan, “The Famulus: The Estate Labourer in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review, supplement no. 2, Cambridge, 1954, p. 3.
49. E.M.R., pp. 16, 173, 218.
50. Ibid., pp. 24, 48, 172-173, 217-218.
51. Postan, “The Famulus,” p. 21; Cart. Rames., vol. 3, pp. 236-241; vol. 1, pp. 319, 330, 340, 351, 363.
52. Postan, “The Famulus,” p. 21.
53. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), p. 110; Walter of Henley, pp. 11-13; David L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in H. E. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2, 1042-1350, Cambridge, 1988, p. 748; Annie Grant, “Animal Resources,” in Astill and Grant, eds., Countryside of Medieval England, p. 174.
54. E.M.R., pp. 25-26; J. A. Raftis, “Farming Techniques (East Midlands),” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2, pp. 336-337.
55. E.M.R., p. 173.
56. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 206.
57. E.M.R., pp. lii-liii.
58. Raftis, Estates of Ramsey Abbey, p. 167.
59. Warren O. Ault, Open-Field Farming in Medieval England: A Study of Village By-Laws, London, 1972, p. 31.
60. Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2, p. 734.
61. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), p. 113.
62. Walter of Henley, p. 25.
63. Robert Trow-Smith, History of British Livestock Husbandry, London, 1957-1959, vol. 1, p. 156.
64. Ibid., p. 153.
65. E.M.R., pp. liii-liv.
66. Trow-Smith, British
Livestock Husbandry, vol. 1, p. 149.
67. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), pp. 117-118.
68. E.M.R., p. Iv.
69. Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 77.
70. Walter of Henley (Rules of St. Robert), p. 141.
71. E. A. Kosminsky, “Services and Money Rents in the Thirteenth Century,” in Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, pp. 31-48.
72. The Estate Book of Henry de Bray, pp. xxiv-xxvii.
73. Beresford and Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages, p. 127.
74. Walter of Henley, p. 19.
75. Ibid., p. 29.
76. E.M.R., pp. 17, 25.
77. Walter of Henley (Seneschaucie), p. 113.
78. Trow-Smith, British Livestock Husbandry, p. 112.
79. Ibid., p. 161; Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2, p. 757; E.M.R., p. liii.
80. Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 215.
81. Thirsk, “Farming Techniques,” in The Agrarian History of England and Waks, vol. 4, p. 163.
82. Trow-Smith, British Livestock Husbandry, p. 169.
CHAPTER 4. THE VILLAGERS: WHO THEY WERE
1. Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, p. 20.
2. Ibid., p. 113.
3. Frederic William Maitland, The Domesday Book and Beyond, New York, 1966 (first pub. in 1897), p. 31.
4. R. H. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in England,” in Hilton, ed., Peasants, Knights, and Heretics, pp. 174-191.
5. F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, Cambridge, 1968, vol. 1, p. 419. On the subject of freedom versus serfdom: R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, London, 1969; Miller and Hatcher, Medieval England, pp. 111-133; M. M. Postan, “Legal Status and Economic Condition in Medieval Villages,” in M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge, 1968, pp. 278-289.
