Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change 1086-1348 (Social and Economic History of England) by Miller Edward & Hatcher John

Author:Miller, Edward & Hatcher, John [Miller, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317872887
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Draught animals

Cows and calves

Sheep

Pigs

South Wiltshire, 1225

1·8

2·8

15·6

0·3

Blackbourne Hundred (Suffolk), 1283

1·0

3·2

10·5

1·4

Liberty of Ramsey manors (Hunts), 1291

2·4

4·5

6·2

3·8

Three Bedfordshire hundreds, 1297

0·8

0·9

2·6

0·1

Liberty of Ripon (Yorks, West Riding), 1297

2·4

1·5

4·0

—

If we can take it more or less at face value, it offers little encouragement to exaggerate the place of pastoral husbandry in the peasant economy. Most surprising, perhaps, is the paucity of peasant pigs: they are modestly ubiquitous only in Suffolk and relatively numerous only in wooded Huntingdonshire. At the same time Huntingdonshire had its fen pastures, helping to explain the high figure there for cows and calves; elsewhere relatively few peasants lacked cows (only about one-fifth of the taxpayers of Bedfordshire and Suffolk), but there is considerable variation between the regions. In Bedfordshire few had more than a single cow, the Yorkshire peasant was a little better off, but the average taxpayer in Suffolk and Wiltshire had around three cows and calves. While a high proportion of taxpayers had cows, it was otherwise with sheep: nearly one-third of the taxpayers in Suffolk, two fifths of them in Huntingdonshire and Wiltshire, over half the Ripon taxpayers and more than two thirds of those in Bedfordshire had no sheep at all. The average figure per taxpayer, moreover, only rises above a very modest level in the markedly pastoral ‘Fielding’ district of northwest Suffolk and the traditional sheep country in southern Wiltshire. In brief, in heavily arable areas (Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, even parts of the liberty of Ripon) the essentially cereal basis of peasant agriculture was diversified only to a very limited extent by sheep-farming. Even in districts with a stronger pastoral bias, moreover, many who were rich enough to be taxpayers had few or no sheep, so that ‘a disproportionate share of the village flocks’ was owned by a limited circle of comparatively wealthy peasants.68 Large peasant sheep-farmers were no more typical of the peasantry as a whole than were men with large arable holdings.

The tax assessments carry a further implication: while almost all taxpayers were mixed farmers to one degree or another, arable husbandry was the main concern of most of them. The evidence the returns afford about draught animals is therefore especially important. Once again they suggest that Bedfordshire men were worst off: in Barford hundred 33 per cent of taxpayers had none at all, 54 per cent had one only and only 13 per cent had two or more. Not surprisingly the average falls below one per taxpayer, and the Suffolk figure is only marginally better. Here the indications are that there was an evident deficiency of peasant draught animals, and even in the counties where taxpayers appear to be better provided draught animals were hardly excessively numerous. Particularly is this the case when we remember that there was also a tail of villagers (how long a tail we cannot measure) who were excused taxation altogether: if their numbers could be taken into account they would inevitably lower the average of livestock per head because they must have had little stock themselves to bring into the reckoning.

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