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Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages

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Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages AN AGE OF TRANSITION? This page intentionally left blank An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages CHRISTOPHER DYER The Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 2001 CLARENDON PRESS Á OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Christopher Dyer 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-822166-5 13579108642 Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd King’s Lynn, Norfolk Preface This book is based on the Ford Lectures which were delivered in the University of Oxford in the Hilary Term of 2001. In introducing his celebrated Ford Lectures in 1953, K. B. McFarlane reports that some of his students imagined that the lectures were funded by the Ford motor company. Their founder was in fact James Ford, the vicar of Navestock in Essex, who cannot have antici- pated that his modest endowment would be so influential, not just through the lectures as delivered, but more widely in their published versions. I confess that when an Oxford friend at a seminar at All Souls in 1998 gave me the first hint that I might be asked to give these lectures—‘Have you heard from the Ford?’—my immediate reaction, accustomed as I am to writing references for applicants for research grants, was to assume that he was referring to the Ford Foundation, and to think of another place in Essex, Dagenham. This lapse reveals me to be an outsider in Oxford, as I have not been a student or teacher there, with the exception of lectures over the years at Rewley House, the University’s lively external studies department. As the result of the generous invitation from the Ford electors, and the good advice of Dr Paul Slack, the chair of the electors, I was able to spend six months living in Oxford. The fellows of St John’s College elected me to their Senior Research Fellowship, which provided me with a house in the town, with easy access to the Bodleian Library and to local archives such as those of Magdalen College. The Oxford historians and archaeologists were very generous in their hospitality, and this gave me the opportunity to sample the cuisine, conversation, ambience, and variety of Latin graces in a dozen colleges. A lecture is very different from a book chapter, and I have encountered the usual dilemmas in converting pieces of writing designed for oral delivery into the fuller and more formal prose appropriate for a book. My solution to the problem has been to preserve the original structure of the six lectures. The obvious difficulty derives from the fact that a text delivered within an hour is so brief that the volume resulting from six lectures, if it faithfully represented the oral version, would be very slim. In my case the script that I carried into the lecture room was much longer than could be accommodated within the allotted time. The text had been drastically shortened with ruthless pencil excisions, but in a process which was uncomfortable for the lecturer (but one hopes not too obvious to listeners), paraphrasing sometimes had to be done at the moment of delivery. The result of this risky strategy was that a full-length book has emerged naturally out of the lecture texts. vi Preface Dozens of people and organizations contributed to the development of the ideas and information that this book contains, and I hope that my selection of those to be acknowledged here causes no offence. My first thanks are to the British Academy, who generously funded the gathering of material and time to analyse it, well before these lectures were delivered. The Arts and Humanities Research Board helped by granting me under their research leave scheme an extra term for research. The University of Birmingham assisted my work by their policy of granting study leaves. The material on which the book depends has been gathered from more than thirty archives, record offices, and libraries, and I thank the staff of those institutions. I have already mentioned the help that I received from the Ford electors, Paul Slack, and St John’s College, and I am very grateful to them. Rees Davies, the Chichele professor, gave good advice, and organized a seminar as an addition to the traditional lecture series, which gave an opportunity for dialogue between lecturer and some of those attending. Specific practical help, references to sources, and general encour- agement were provided by Nat Alcock, Anne Baker, George Demidowicz, Geoff Egan, Harold Fox, Mark Gardiner, Evan Jones, Derek Keene, Hannes Kleineke, John Langdon, Jane Laughton, Maureen Mellor, Colin Richmond, Chris Thornton, Penny Upton, Jei Yang, and Margaret Yates. The typescript was prepared by Nancy Moore, and Andy Isham drew the maps and figures. Jenny Dyer helpfully commented on drafts. Barbara Harvey and John Lang- don read the whole text and recommended improvements. At the Oxford University Press I was encouraged initially by Tony Morris, and then by the always patient and helpful Ruth Parr and Anne Gelling. Jeff New has been an observant and conscientious editor. The success of a lecture series depends on those who attend the occasions. No one was under any obligation to take part, and the presence of the Oxford historians, and many visitors from Birmingham and elsewhere, maintained my morale, and led me to believe that the material merited the extra effort to produce this book. I should add that preparing and delivering these lectures changed my life in a number of ways. Working and living in Oxford provided an intense and enjoyable respite from the routines of teaching and adminis- tration of normal academic life. Within two months of the last lecture I had decided to accept an offer of a new post at the University of Leicester. The move inevitably took up some time, which delayed the writing of this book, but Leicester’s generous treatment has also given me the opportunity to bring the lectures through the last stages for publication. C.C.D. April 2004 Contents List of Maps and Figures viii List of Tables ix Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1. A New Middle Ages 7 2. Community and Privacy 46 3. Authority and Freedom 86 4. Consumption and Investment 126 5. Subsistence and Markets 173 6. Work and Leisure 211 Conclusion 242 Bibliography 247 Index 280 List of Maps and Figures 1.1. The township of Lark Stoke, Warwickshire, in c.1300 and in the early modern period 19 1.2. Towns in Leicestershire in the fourteenth century 22 2.1. Plans of peasant houses and manor houses 54 2.2. Plan of the village of Broxholme in Lincolnshire 57 2.3. Common pastures and landscapes in Alvechurch, King’s Norton, and Yardley, Worcestershire, 1221–1332 60 2.4. Roel in Gloucestershire, showing the house of Henry Channdeler, c.1400 77 2.5. Quinton in Warwickshire in the fifteenth century 80 3.1. The estate of the Catesby family, 1386 101 4.1. House at Tyddyn Llwydion, Pennant Melangell, Montgomeryshire 136 4.2. Little Bursted farmhouse at Upper Hardres, Kent 138 4.3. Cast metal buckles from London, and a pilgrim badge from Salisbury, Wiltshire 140 4.4. Pottery drinking vessels from Oxfordshire 142 4.5. Fluctuations in market tolls at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire 147 4.6. Dated rural cruck houses from the midlands 153 4.7. West Colliford stamping mill, St Neot parish, Cornwall 165 5.1. Estates of the Spencer and Mervyn families, 1494–1522 205 List of Tables 1.1. Crops produced at Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire, in the 1390s 28 1.2. Landholding at Navestock, Essex, 1222–1840 44 4.1. Expenditure on meals given to building workers, 1377–1440 (with some comparisons) 133 5.1. Some prices of customary land in Norfolk, 1390–1543 (per acre) 183 5.2. Evidence of credit from inventories and accounts, 1464–1520 187 5.3. Some examples of farmers in the lay subsidies of 1524 and 1525 209 Abbreviations AHEW Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. J. Thirsk; vol. 2, 1042–1350, ed. H. E. Hallam (Cambridge, 1988); vol. 3, 1348–1500, ed. E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991) Ag.HR Agricultural History Review CUHB Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. P.Clark; vol.
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