This is an edited piece out of the same book as I took those concerning farming practices.
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.”
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). 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.
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.
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.”
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 only villein land, but by the thirteenth century many villeins held some free land and many free men some villein land.
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.” 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.
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.
A statistical picture of the pattern was compiled by Soviet economic historian E. A. Kosminsky, who analyzed the landholding information supplied by the Hundred Rolls survey of 1279 of seven Midland counties, including Huntingdonshire. He found that 32 percent of all the arable land formed the lord’s demesne, 40 percent was held by villeins, and 28 percent by freeholders. About a fifth of the peasantry held approximately a virgate and more than a third held half-virgates. A few highly successful families had accumulated 100 acres or more. In general, the size of holdings was diminishing as the population grew. Out of 13,500 holdings in 1279, 46 percent amounted to 10 acres or less, probably near the minimum for subsistence.
The Hundred Rolls data for Elton are in rough accord with the overall figures. The survey lists first the abbot’s holdings; then the tenants, their holdings and legal status, and their obligations to abbot and king.The abbot’s demesne contained the curia’s acre and a half, his three hides of arable land, his sixteen acres of meadow and three of pasture, his three mills, and the fishing rights he held on the river.
The list of tenants was headed by “John, son of John of Elton,” a major free tenant who held a hide (6 virgates, or 144 acres) of the abbot’s land, amounting to a small estate within the manor, with its own tenants: one free virgater and nine cotters (men holding a cottage and a small amount of land). Next were listed the abbot’s other tenants, twenty-two free men, forty-eight villeins, and twenty-eight cotters; and finally the rector and four cotters who were his tenants.
These 114 names of heads of families by no means accounted for all the inhabitants of the village, or even the male inhabitants; at least 150 other identifiable names appear in the court rolls of 1279-1300, representing other family members, day laborers, manorial workers, and craftsmen.
John of Elton—or “John le Lord,” as he is referred to in one court record—was the village’s aristocrat, though devoid of any title of nobility. His miniature estate had been assembled by twelfth-century ancestors by one means or another. Of his hide of land, thirty-six acres formed the demesne. He owed suit (attendance) to the abbot’s honor court at Broughton, the court for the entire estate, as well as “the third part of a suit” (attendance at every third session) to the royal shire and hundred courts. His one free tenant, John of Langetoft, held a virgate “by charter” (deed), and paid a token yearly rent of one penny. Half a virgate of the hide belonged to the abbot “freely in perpetual alms.” The rest was divided among nine cotters (averaging out to eight acres apiece).
The abbot’s twenty-two other tenants listed as free in the Hundred Rolls survey held varying amounts of land for which they owed minor labor services and money rent ranging from four shillings one penny a year to six shillings. Among them were three whose claim to freedom was later rejected by the manorial court, an indication of the uncertainty often surrounding the question of freedom.
The forty-eight villeins of Elton—“customary tenants,” subject to the “custom of the manor,” meaning its labor services and dues—included thirty-nine virgaters and nine half-virgaters. Growth of population had turned some family virgates into half-virgates, a process that had advanced much farther elsewhere, often leaving no full virgaters at all. No Elton villein held more than a virgate, though land-rich villeins were a well-known phenomenon elsewhere.
Elton’s villeins performed substantial labor services, which were spelled out in detail in the survey, the half-virgaters owing half the work obligations of the virgaters. This work had a monetary value, and exemption could be purchased by the tenant, with the price paid going to pay hired labor.
Every “work,” meaning day’s work, owed by the villein was defined. One day’s harrowing counted as one work; so did winnowing thirty sheaves of barley or twenty-four sheaves of wheat; collecting a bag of nuts “well cleaned”; or working in the vineyard; or making a hedge in the fields of a certain length; or carrying hay in the peasant’s cart; or if he did not have a cart, hens, geese, cheese, and eggs “on his back.”
In 1286, sixteen of the forty-eight customary tenants had all their yearround works commuted to money payments, and owed only the special works at harvest time. From the annual fee paid by these tenants, called the censum (quit-rent), they were said to be tenants ad censum, or censuarii. The other customary tenants were ad opus (at work [services]) and were operarii.
Though such substitution of money payments for labor services was convenient for the villein in many ways, in other ways it was a disadvantage. Much, obviously, depended on the size of the payment. J. A. Raftis has calculated that the amount of the censum paid by a Ramsey Abbey villein was substantially larger than the total sum of the prices of his individual works. The Elton court rolls imply that it was not desirable to be placed ad censum, and in fact that tenants were so classed arbitrarily. In 1279 two villagers accused the reeve of “taking the rich off the censum and putting the poor on it,” apparently in exchange for bribes.
Land was not the only form of wealth. Few areas in the thirteenth century as yet put sheep- or cattle-raising ahead of crop farming, but many villagers owned animals. Information about village stock is scanty, but some has been gleaned from the records of royal taxes levied at intervals to finance war. Villagers were assessed on the basis of their livestock, grain, and other products.
M. M. Postan has extracted valuable information from the assessment record of 1291, including data on five Ramsey Abbey villages. Elton was not among the five, but the figures may be taken as broadly typical of the region. They show the average taxpaying villager owning 6.2 sheep, 4.5 cows and calves, 3.1 pigs, and 2.35 horses and oxen.
These figures do not mean that each villager owned approximately 16 animals. Exempt were the poor cotters who owned property worth less than 6 shillings 8 pence, about the value of one ox or cow. Furthermore, as Postan demonstrates, many taxpaying villagers owned no sheep, while a few rich peasants held a large fraction of the total village flock. Plow animals, cows, and pigs appear to have been distributed more evenly, though another scholar, speaking of England in general, asserts that “the bulk of the people owned no more working animals, cows, and sheep, than were necessary for their own subsistence.”
The Elton manorial court rolls of the early 1300s list numbers of villagers, mostly customary tenants with virgates, but also a few cotters, whose “beasts” or “draught beasts” had committed trespasses “in the lord’s meadow” or “in the lord’s grain.” In 1312 the beasts of twelve villagers grazed in the fields at a time prohibited by the village bylaws, or “trod the grain” of fellow villagers. A number of villagers are mentioned as having horses, many as having sheep or pigs.
