The Hollow Crown by Miri Rubin

Author:Miri Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

RURAL LIFE

For peasants this was still a period of opportunity, as the trend of leasing out prime agricultural land still continued. In these decades the long process of leasing out of choice demesne lands was reaching its completion. Management of estates had become a difficult and risky affair in an economy characterized by a falling supply of labour for agrarian work and declining efficiency. The repeated visitations of plague constantly changed the balance between humans, livestock, pests and the built environment, which was increasingly in a state of decay. The job of estate manager was hard to fulfil successfully. In Hinderclay (Suffolk) fourteen managers were in post between 1379 and 1406, of which only one – a very successful one – lasted in the post for ten years. Such men had to take hard decisions: on manors in East Anglia sheep-breeding was centralized in order to reduce cost, but this resulted in greater inbreeding with raised susceptibility to disease in the flocks. At Wisbech (Cambridgeshire), in a desire to cut costs while wool prices were low, maintenance of sheep-cotes was neglected, and so sheep grazed on marshland, where they often developed rot, and even drowned. A constant and subtle assessment of cost and the benefits of investment occupied the minds of manor officials, and determined the conditions of work for agricultural labourers.

Some secular lords chose a different direction altogether – that of labour-intensive and scrutinizing enforcement of traditional manorial rights: men such as the Lords Grey of Ruthin in their Bedfordshire estates, who saw their manorial incomes rise steadily throughout the fifteenth century. The fact that agricultural land was now available through the simple device of a lease created opportunities for expansion in villages, and occasions for migration to neighbouring manors. Yet even as leases proliferated, claims to land through inheritance were cherished and remained the major mode of transmission of land, even from the distance of generations, and even to kin who had long left the community. In 1404 Thomas Adams succeeded to half of a half-yardland, once Roger Ketel’s in Illey (Warwickshire), after the death of his niece; it was to pass to his younger brother were he to die. But in 1420 a blood relative of Roger Ketel came to claim it, and the jurors preferred this claim, an indisputable though hitherto unrealized link of blood and expectation which predated Thomas Adams’s. Customary land, held through inheritance, incurred only a low customary rent, while new leases, even of better land, deterred modest folk by the higher rents demanded for them.

Supervision of village cooperation belonged to rural communities. The documents created by them in these decades reflect the processes. In Harleston (Norfolk) c.1410 the north-east and south fields were sown to produce a full year’s need in wheat, barley, beans and peas, while leaving one field fallow. At the same time a jury of nine, which included several villagers, supervised the feeding of stock in meadows and pasture. For his part, the lord promised to enclose his own

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.