Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [25]
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 luxuries 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