Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [19]
Walter of Henley, himself a former bailiff, advised lords and stewards against choosing from their circle of kindred and friends, and to make the selection strictly on merit.24 The bailiff was paid an excellent cash salary plus perquisites, at Elton twenty shillings a year plus room and board, a fur coat, fodder for his horse, and twopence to make his Christmas oblation (offering). Two other officials, subordinate to the bailiff, are mentioned in the Elton accounts: the claviger or macebearer, and the serjeant, but both offices seem to have disappeared shortly after 1300.25
The bailiff’s residence was the lord’s manor house. Set clearly apart from the village’s collection of flimsy wattle-and-daub dwellings, the solid-stone, buttressed manor house contrasted with them in its ample interior space and at least comparative comfort. The main room, the hall, was the setting for the manorial court, but otherwise remained at the bailiff’s disposal. There he and his family took their meals along with such members of the manorial household as were entitled to board at the lord’s table, either continuously or at certain times, plus occasional visitors. A stone bench at the southern end flanked a large rectangular limestone hearth. The room was furnished with a trestle table, wooden benches, and a “lavatorium,” a metal washstand. A garderobe, or privy, adjoined. One end of the hall was partitioned off as a buttery and a larder. The sleeping chamber whose existence is attested by repairs to it and to its door may have been a room with a fireplace uncovered by the excavations of 1977. A chapel stood next to the manor house.26 For the entertainment of guests “carrying the lord’s writ,” such as the steward or the clerk of the accounts, the bailiff kept track of his costs and submitted the expenses to Ramsey. Visitors included monks and officials on their way to the Stamford Fair, or to be ordained in Stamford; other ecclesiastics, among them the abbot’s two brothers and the prior of St. Ives; and royal officials—the justice of the forest, the sheriff of Huntingdon,
Manor house, c. 1170, at Burton Agnes (Humberside): ground-floor undercroft.
Manor house, Burton Agnes: upper hall.
kings’ messengers, and once “the twelve regarders,” knights who enforced the king’s forest law.27 The guests’ horses and dogs had to be lodged and fed, and sometimes their falcons, including “the falcons of the lord abbot.”28 In 1298 when the royal army was on its way to Scotland, a special expense was incurred, a bribe of sixpence to “a certain man of the Exchequer of the lord king…for sparing our horses.”29 On several later occasions expenses are noted either for feeding military parties or bribing them to go elsewhere.
Assisting the bailiff was a staff of subordinate officials chosen annually from and usually (as in Elton) by the villagers themselves. Chief of these was the reeve. Always a villein, he was one of the most prosperous—“the best husbandman,” according to Seneschaucie.30 Normally the new reeve succeeded at Michaelmas (September 29), the beginning of the agricultural year. His main duty was seeing that the villagers who owed labor service rose promptly and reported for work. He supervised the formation
Manor house at Boothby Pagnell (Lincolnshire), c. 1200, also built with an undercroft and an upper hall. Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England.
of the plow teams, saw to the penning and folding of the lord’s livestock, ordered the mending of the lord’s fences, and made sure sufficient forage was saved for the winter.31 Seneschaucie admonished him to make sure no herdsman slipped off to fair, market, wrestling match, or tavern without obtaining leave and finding a substitute.32 He might, as occasionally at Elton,