Peasants, Manors, and the Village Economy
The 1300s and 1400s were a hard age for the manorial peasant but, by the standards of the high Middle Ages, a generous one. The Black Death of 1348–49, recurring outbreaks in 1361, 1369, 1375, and beyond, and the final catastrophic sweep of 1400 removed perhaps 40 to 60 per cent of the population of England and a comparable fraction across much of western Europe. The result was a century of contested rebalancing, in which surviving peasants bargained over wages, rents, fines, and freedom, and in which the legal scaffolding of serfdom was gradually dismantled in the west, even as it tightened in the east. The three articles in this section reconstruct the manor, the status of serf and free, and the everyday life of the village community in which perhaps four out of every five late medieval Europeans still spent their lives.
The Manor as a Unit of Production and Lordship
The late medieval manor was simultaneously a property, a court, and a community. A great ecclesiastical estate such as the bishopric of Winchester’s hundred of Meon in Hampshire, or the duchy of Lancaster’s Honour of Pontefract in the West Riding, drew rents, customs, and labour services from scores of tenant families, kept a court roll that recorded fines, heriots, and surrenders of land, and maintained a demesne that might cover 200 to 500 acres. The literature on the manor was for a long time dominated by the grand surveys of Marc Bloch and Georges Duby, who stressed the seigneurial banalités — the lord’s monopoly over the mill, the bakehouse, the wine press, and the oven — and the slow, almost imperceptible spread of money rents. By the 1300s, however, the demesne was already creaking, and the seigneurial reaction of the 1370s and 1380s — the English Statute of Labourers of 1351, the French ordonnances of Charles V, the attempts of the lords of Hainaut to peg wages — shows that the upper orders were themselves aware of the squeeze. The full anatomy of the late medieval manor is set out in the article on what a medieval manor was.
Serfdom under Pressure: From Custom to Contract
The legal status of the late medieval peasant varied dramatically by region. The English villein of the manorial court rolls — bound to a particular lord, fined for marrying a daughter without licence, subject to merchet and heriot — was, on paper, similar to the French serf de mainmorte of the Bourbonnais or the German Leibeigene. In practice, by 1400, real serfdom was retreating to a band running from the Elbe eastward into Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and the lands of the Teutonic Order, where what Robert Brenner famously called the “second serfdom” tightened across the sixteenth century. In the west, custom and the courts did most of the work. The case-load of the manor courts of, for instance, Forncett in Norfolk in the 1380s, as analysed by Judith Bennett, shows villeins and free tenants alike using the lord’s court to defend holdings of fifteen, twenty, and forty acres, and lords compromising because the alternative — an empty tenantry — was worse. The slow legal collapse of personal serfdom in England, marked by the courts’ recognition of copyhold tenure and, finally, the abolition of villeinage in the cases collected in Coke on Littleton (1628), is the subject of the article on serfdom and freedom in late medieval Europe.
The Village Community and Its Common Resources
The village was not the harmonious collective of Victorian rural nostalgia, nor the bleak site of class warfare of some later accounts; it was a working community, often riven by disputes, in which cooperation was necessary because arable farming was. The open fields of, for example, the three-village complex of Laxton in Nottinghamshire — the only English village to retain its medieval open-field system into the modern period — were run by a sequence of ploughing teams, by a sequence of crops in each of the three seasons, and by a sequence of stinting rules on the common meadow and the aftermath grazing. The parish church, the guild of neighbours (the frérèche in northern France, the Bruderschaft in the Rhineland), and the manorial court together disciplined the rhythms of sowing, reaping, shearing, and harvesting. Christopher Dyer and David Herlihy have both stressed the dignity — and, in many cases, the growing comfort — of the late medieval peasant household in this period; but the village was also the locus of the Jacquerie of 1358, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and the Tuchin revolt in Languedoc. The community’s life of work, neighbourliness, and faith is treated in the article on the medieval village community.
What this section covers
- What was a medieval manor?
- Serfdom and freedom in late medieval Europe
- The medieval village community, work, and faith