Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [44]
Where no heir could be found, the lord provided a tenant. “One cottage which John Stabler formerly held in bondage for 12 pence a year is in the hand of the lord,” reported the Elton court record in 1342. “Therefore it is commanded to make provision of one tenant. Afterward, they say, Alexander Cook came and paid entry fee.”10
The Elton accounts also record several cases in which the land of a deceased tenant was rented out by the lord, sometimes to several villagers, in small parcels: “three rods,” “an acre,” “four acres of land and an acre of meadow.” Usually the rent was substantially raised, and the lease made “for the term of life.”11
Heriot passes unmentioned in Elton documents except for the comment that a widow succeeding to a holding did not pay it (implying that a son succeeding did).12 Most manors exacted heriot from the widow. A custumal of Brancaster, a Norfolk manor belonging to Ramsey Abbey, states: “If [the villein] virgater dies, the lord has his best beast of the house, if he has a beast. If there is no beast, she gives 32 pence and she holds her husband’s land for the service which pertains to it.”13 Usually a person inheriting a virgate gave a cow or horse, one inheriting a half-virgate a sheep. On some Ramsey Abbey manors, the village rector rather than the lord received the best beast, under the name of “mortuary.”14 Sometimes the fine was simply levied in money: at Abbot’s Ripton, Hemmingford, and Wistow the widow of a virgater gave five shillings as heriot, half the price of a horse, ox, or cow.15
At Chalgrave in 1279, a jury weighed the question of the rival claims of lord and church on the estate of a man who had no animal. The jury decided that the lord “should have the best cloth or grain whichever shall please him the more, before holy church may have anything of the dead person.” They cited the precedent of “a certain Ascelina who was the wife of Roger the reeve,” and who had held eight acres of land in the time of the grandfather of the present lord, “and had no animal.” The lord took in heriot “the best cloth which she had, to wit, one tunic of blanket [cloth], before holy church took away anything. Afterwards a certain Nigel the Knight, holding the same land, died as tenant, and had no animal. Therefore the lord by custom took one tabard [tunic] of gray in the name of heriot, and he can rightly do so from all his customary tenants in the manor of Chalgrave.”16 One study shows that of eighty-six heriots exacted at Langley, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1348, twenty-two were horses, seventeen cows, eight bulls, five sheep, and the remaining thirty-two insignificant chattels such as a mattock or a pitcher, or “nothing because they are poor.”17
Among the villagers as among the nobility, primogeniture created some problems while solving others. It kept holdings intact, but as land grew scarce, older sons of both nobility and peasantry had to wait until their fathers died or retired before marrying. Younger sons of the nobility traditionally had to leave the family estate to seek their fortunes in war, or embark on careers in the Church. Younger sons of the peasantry might enlist as common soldiers, or (on payment of a fee to the lord) undertake training for the lower ranks of the clergy. Among the better-off peasants, many fathers gave younger sons small grants of land, often purchased in the growing peasant land market. Edward Britton found that in Broughton 44 percent of the elite families had two or more sons established simultaneously in the village. Younger sons of the poor peasants were not so lucky, generally having to choose between staying home, celibate, and taking their chances as day laborers, perhaps slipping into vagabondage and crime.18
A few peasants made wills, an increasingly popular measure in the fourteenth century, often recorded in the manorial court rolls. In King’s Ripton in 1309, Nicholas Newman bequeathed a rod of land