Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [32]
In addition to these suspect outsiders, the village had its eccentrics and mentally ill. In 1306 John Chapman was admonished by the court to see that his son Thomas “who is partly a lunatic” (in parte lunaticus) should “henceforth behave himself among his neighbors.”40 The coroners’ rolls record other cases involving mental aberration. In 1316 a peasant woman at Yelden, Bedfordshire, afflicted with “an illness called frenzy,” got out of bed, seized an axe, slew her son and three daughters, and “hanged herself in her house on a beam with two cords of hemp.”41
The peasants of a medieval village were once pictured as coexisting in a state of what might be called mediocre equality. Actually wide differences in wealth existed. Land was the most important kind of wealth, and the distribution of land was far from equal. Furthermore, some tenants, both villein and free, were increasing their holdings by buying or leasing from the others.
In theory, all land needed to be preserved and transmitted intact to heirs, both to protect the integrity of the holding for the family and to assure the lord of his rents and services. Alienation—sale—was therefore theoretically forbidden. In reality, sale and lease of land were prominent features of the court rolls of the late thirteenth century, and not new phenomena. The lord’s acquiescence reflected the profits to be made from the transaction—the opportunity of raising rents and collecting license fees.
In Elton, where a substantial number of the tenants were free, many of the sales recorded were by free men, some of whom sold consistently, some of whom bought, some of whom both bought and sold. Transactions were nearly all small. John Hering appears in the court rolls in 1292 selling two and a half rods to Alice daughter of Bateman of Clipsham,42 and again in 1300 selling an acre to Joan wife of Gilbert Engayne of Wansford and also half an acre to Richard of Thorpe Waterville.43 In 1312 Thomas Chausey sold half an acre to Reginald of Yarwell and two rods to Richard Carpenter.44 In 1322 Richard Fraunceys sold half an acre to John Smith and half an acre to Richard Eliot;45 Richard Eliot, meanwhile, acquired another two acres from John Ketel, who also sold a rod of land to Richard Chapleyn of Wansford;46 John Ketel at the same time bought half an acre of meadow from Clement Crane.47 Among the villeins, Muriel atte Gate and William Harpe each sold an acre to Nicholas Miller “without the license of the lord” and were fined sixpence each.48 The only sizable transaction before 1350 was that of Reginald Child and John son of Henry Reeve, who in 1325 divided between them a virgate of land that had belonged to John Wagge. Apparently because they had done so without license, they were fined two shillings “for having the judgment of the court,” though the transaction seems to have stood.49
Anne De Windt, analyzing land transfers in the Ramsey Abbey village of King’s Ripton, where only one of the tenants was free, found 292 transfers among the unfree tenants between 1280 and 1397, the majority dealing with plots of between one-half and two and a half acres in the open fields, the others houses, auxiliary buildings, houseplots, and closes. Approximately one-third of the population participated at one time or another in the real-estate market. Thirty-six percent of the deals involved less than an acre of land, 57 percent from one to ten acres, 7 percent from ten to twenty acres. Some of the buyers were evidently newcomers to the village, purchasing holdings. Others apparently bought to satisfy the needs of daughters and younger sons. Still others leased the land they had acquired to subtenants, becoming peasant landlords. By the last half of the fourteenth century, a few families in nearly every English village had accumulated enough land to constitute