Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [31]
Servants of the villagers are omitted from the Hundred Rolls, but are mentioned occasionally in the rolls of the manorial court: Edith Comber, maidservant (ancilla) to William son of Letitia, “carried away some of the lord’s peas”;27 Alice, servant of Nicholas Miller, was fined for stealing hay and stubble;28 John Wagge’s male servant was fined for careless planting of beans in the lord’s field;29 Matilda Prudhomme’s servant Hugh was attacked and wounded by John Blaccalf.30
Among the tenants listed in the Hundred Rolls were many of the village’s principal craftsmen. In Elton, the two gristmills were kept under the management of the manorial officials and the profits paid to the abbot. The miller was probably recompensed by a share of the “multure,” the portion of flour kept as payment. In most villages the miller “farmed” the mill, paying a fixed sum to the lord and profiting from the difference between that and the multure. The popular reputation of the miller was notorious. Chaucer’s miller
…was a master-hand at stealing grain.
He felt it with his thumb and thus he knew
Its quality and took three times his due—
A thumb of gold, by God, to gauge an oat!31
At Elton, the miller collected the toll from persons using the mill as a bridge to cross the Nene. One was relieved of his office in 1300 for “letting strangers cross without paying toll,” in exchange for “a gift.”
Two others, Matefrid and Stephen Miller, successfully sued William of Barnwell in 1294 for slander in saying that they had taken two bushels of his malt “in a wrongful manner.”32 At the same court, however, the jurors found that another miller and his wife, Robert and Athelina Stekedec, had “unjustly detained” one whole ring of barley (four bushels). They were fined sixpence and ordered to make restitution.33
Two bakers farmed Elton’s communal ovens in 1286, Adam Brid paying an annual rent of 13 shillings 4 pence for one and Henry Smith 33 shillings 4 pence for the other.34 The smithy was not nearly as valuable. Robert son of Henry Smith was recorded as paying an annual rent of two shillings in 1308.35
Other tradesmen appear in the court rolls: Thomas Dyer was accused by Agnes daughter of Beatrice of “unjust detention of one cloth of linen weave,” for the dyeing of which she had promised him a bushel of barley. The jurors decided that Thomas had “only acted justly,” since Agnes had not paid him the grain, and that he was entitled to hold on to the cloth until she did so.36
Several villagers were part-time butchers and paid, “for exercising the office,” an annual fee of two capons: Ralph Hubert, Geoffrey Abbot, William of Bumstead, Robert Godswein, William of Barnwell, Thomas Godswein, Robert Stekedec (who was also a miller), and Richard Tidewell.
Robert Chapman cultivated land while at the same time practicing the trade of merchant. Robert is recorded as selling a bushel of wheat to Emma Prudhomme in 1294,37 and later of suing her for a hood which she agreed to deliver to John son of John of Elton, but Emma “did not undertake to pay” for it.38
Other villagers whose names suggest that they practiced trades were Ralph and Geoffrey Shoemaker, Elias and Stephen Carpenter, Roger and Robert Taylor (who may have made shoes, built houses, or made clothing), and William and Henry Woolmonger.
Dwelling uneasily on the fringes of the village, outside its organization, were a shifting set of “strangers.” Several times villagers were fined for “harboring” them. They are characterized as “outside the assize”: day laborers, itinerant craftsmen, and vagabonds, the latter a class who turn up frequently in the royal coroners’ rolls. In 1312 six villagers were fined and commanded to desist from harboring strangers. Richard le Wyse harbored Henry the Cooper and his wife “to