Tag: Book (Non-fiction)

In the final chapter of this book Prestwich draws together the ideas and themes he explored in the rest of the book and discusses what it meant to be English during this period (1225-1360). On the one hand England was a pretty cosmopolitan society – there were many leading figures in the government who weren’t English born, and migrants with useful skills were encouraged (Flemish weavers during Edward III’s reign, for instance). On the other hand there was a strong sense of an English identity. Foreigners apparently had a simple stereotype: Englishmen had tails and were usually drunk! The English themselves had a bit more of a nuanced view, although not necessarily more complimentary. The author of the Vita of Edward II for instance said that the English “excel other nations in three qualities, in pride, in craft and in perjury”. The north/south divide is already evident during this time – southerners are considered more civilised. And there is still a sense of an ethnic divide between the aristocracy (of Norman descent) and commoners (of Saxon descent) but both are also considered English.

Language was important to both national identity and social status. There was a sense that English people should speak English – and Edward III used the idea that the French wanted to wipe out the use of English in England as a piece of propaganda to drum up popular support for his wars in France. But speaking French still marked one as part of the social elite. Prestwich discusses how this French is changing and becoming more English – by the end of the period it’s generally a learnt language not a naturally acquired one, and the French definitely think that the English speakers of French don’t speak it properly. Culturally England is still close to Northern France, but differences are beginning to emerge. The English literature of the period (whether written in English or French) has a distinctive voice, and has English heroes and covers themes & political concerns peculiar to England.

During this period English art & architecture also developed a distinct style. For most of the 13th Century Western European culture was dominated by the French styles of architecture, but by the late 13th Century the English Decorated style was developing. It was more exuberant, and featured more naturalistic carving & sculpture. Art in the form of paintings hasn’t survived in particularly great numbers & Prestwich doesn’t discuss how this compared to the previous French style. Illuminated manuscripts and embroidery (tapestry) do survive and display high quality work – some of it reflecting the new English Decorated style of the architecture.

The legal system was an important part of English identity. In border regions whose law you were subjected to was important – a lord who had both English and Welsh tenants in the Marches would be expected to deal with the two groups via their own law and their own courts. The legal system in England was distinctive in that it was not codified – it was a law based on litigation and precedents, and it was primarily learnt by attending courts. This was something that struck me in particular while I was reading this book – how much is known because the court records are preserved, and how often people took each other to court.

The mythology surrounding England’s origins as a country had a couple of different (mutually contradictory strands) during this era. One strand emphasised King Arthur and the Britons, with an ultimate origin of the country in Brutus the Trojan who defeated giants in Albion and founded Britain. The other concentrated on the Anglo-Saxons and the uniting of their kingdoms, and appealed to the authority of Bede’s history of the English.

The wars of the period helped to strengthen the sense of Englishness. In the case of the Anglo-Scottish wars there weren’t particularly large cultural differences between the two sides, but propaganda (on both sides) still made the enemy out to be vicious barbarians coming to commit atrocities against civilised people. The Anglo-French wars are often held up as important in forging an sense of Englishness as distinct from the Norman culture that stretched across England and Northern France. However Prestwich thinks it wasn’t that significant – he sees most of the national sentiments as being there already. And points out that Edward III would want to be careful about negative portrayals of the people he hoped to rule if he won.

The intellectual life of England was a significant part of the mainstream European intellectual culture. Oxford and Cambridge were two of the greatest universities of Europe in this period. Prestwich gives mini-biographies of a few of the intellectual elite – including Ockham of Ockham’s Razor – and discusses briefly the controversy of the day: nominalism vs. realism. Slightly confusingly nominalism is the school of thought that the only real things are those that can be observed and tested, whereas realism holds that there are absolute realities which the actual objects can only be approximations of.

Prestwich concludes by looking at the large scale trends throughout the period that the book covers. In the 1220s England was politically unstable with a weak monarchy and factional rifts among the ruling elite. The country was also militarily weak, and had barely succeeded in keeping independent of French rule. In contrast, the economy was strong, the population was rising and the peasants were firmly under the thumb of the aristocracy. By the 1360s this was reversed – England was politically and militarily strong, but the economy and population had collapsed (particularly in the wake of the Black Death). The peasantry were more able to make their feelings known as labour was now scarce. One of the key developments of the era not touched on by my simplistic summary was the emergence of Parliament as a mechanism for the monarch to consult with not just the highest ranking nobles but also the community of the realm as a whole via representatives for each county.

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And so I have finally finished this book – I was reading it for around 18 months in the end. Which is too long! And it was primarily because I wasn’t very diligent at coming back to reading it. But also because writing the summaries takes time and so I don’t tend to read much more till I’m caught up with that in case I get too far ahead of myself. On the other hand, writing the summaries means I’ve retained rather more of the information, so I think it’s a net positive.

I enjoyed reading the book – I found Prestwich’s style readable and at times humorous (in a dry academic fashion). When I’ve whittled down my to-be-read pile a bit I may look for some more of his books – I know he’s written a biography of Edward I which would be interesting. It’s part of a series of books from Yale University Press on English Monarchs, which may make for an interesting project once I’ve finished the New Oxford History of England series (of which the present book is part) in a decade or two!

I’m into the home straight with this book – and actually finished reading it a while ago, I’ve just got a backlog of posts to write 🙂 This is the penultimate chapter, all that’s left after this is the conclusion.

Population and the Black Death

The overall picture of population changes in England between 1225 and 1360 is first growth in the 13th Century, followed by a plateau in the early 14th Century and a catastrophic decrease caused by the Black Death in 1348. However despite this clear big picture the details are more difficult to get a proper grasp of, and so Prestwich spent the first half of this chapter looking at the sorts of evidence used to assess the population and discussing the sorts of numbers these indicate.

The population of a region is affected by three things – birth rate, death rate and migration – and Prestwich looks at these in turn. There’s very little evidence for what the birth rate in England was during this period – births were not required to be recorded. And it is difficult to make generalisations from what data there is because birth rates vary within populations & across time. There is some evidence that people tried to control the size of their families (via herbal concoctions or coitus interuptus) despite the disapproval of the Church. However a lack of understanding of reproductive biology & the female anatomy meant that this was difficult to do successfully. Prestwich notes that there is very little evidence for abortion (or attempted abortion), nor for infanticide. Death rates were affected by environmental causes like famines, and also by economic circumstances. Prestwich suggests that the growth in the 13th Century may’ve lead to the population outstripping the ability of the cultivatable land to feed it, leading to the plateau in the early 14th Century. Migration to and from England had little effect on the overall population, however internal migration had a large effect on the population of particular towns etc.

Prestwich next works through a couple of examples of starting assumptions and hypotheses to arrive at some estimates for the overall population at the peak at end of the 13th Century. All the methods of calculating the population have their own problems, and the margins of error are huge. However Prestwich suggests figures of between 4 million and 7 million, with 5 million being a plausible number to keep in mind. This is about two to three times the population at the end of the 11th Century (which one can estimate using the Domesday Book as a starting point). For a couple of modern comparisons: the modern population of Scotland is of the order of 5 milliion people, in contrast the population of London in 2013 (according to wikipedia) was on the order of 8.5 million.

On a more local level there are sometimes surviving records that give a better indication of population levels in a particular community – but historians disagree about how reliable these are (and how to extrapolate from what’s there). For instance manorial court records survive for some areas – like Coltishall in Norfolk where numbers of tenants can be calculated: 119 in 1314, 168 in 1349 and 74 in 1359. That doesn’t tell you how big their families were but it does suggest a rising population which then falls sharply after the Black Death. Prestwich goes through a few examples of the types of records that survive and what they can tell us. He also discusses the indirect evidence that can be used – like how much land is in cultivation (more suggests more people need fed). Or how much tax was returned from a community.

The second half of the chapter discusses the Black Death. This was probably the biggest human catastrophe ever to affect England – up to half the population died. It is generally said that the Black Death was an epidemic of Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague), and I had thought this was a known thing. However Prestwich devotes three or so pages to discussing the problems with this identification and what alternatives there may be. The argument against bubonic plague being the Black Death is that the symptoms & fatality levels as well as the spread speed & pattern of the disease do not match that seen in more modern outbreaks where we have much more accurate information. The usual answer to this is that the bacillus has mutated significantly since the 14th Century, and thus the disease we see now is not the disease they suffered. Prestwich is very keen to point out that this is just a hypothesis, and other explanations should not be dismissed out of hand. He doesn’t, however, have a favoured answer – he lists three possibilities (anthrax, influenza, a viral haemorrhagic disease) but also explains why they are implausible.

The epidemic, whatever it was, arrived on English soil sometime in June 1348 at the port of Melcombe Regis in Dorset. By November it had reached London, and in 1349 it spread throughout the country. Mortality was highest during the late spring & early summer of 1349. Death rates can be estimated using the surviving records although these generally do not list cause of death so some interpretation is needed to arrive at figures. Although perhaps as much as half the overall population died this was not evenly spread through society. The higher aristocracy were much less affected with only one member of the royal family dying in the outbreak, and only 13% of the parliamentary peerage in 1349. Clergy were more affected than this – with figures ranging from 29% to 60% in different areas. Those who resided with their congregations were more affected than those who did not. Mortality among monastic communities was very variable with some being nearly wiped out and others barely affected. Mortality amongst the rural population was much the same as for the clergy who resided amongst them (unsurprisingly). Data for the urban population is much more incomplete but one might assume it would be higher than in rural areas due to the greater numbers of people in close proximity. There are indications such as numbers of wills registered compared to a normal year or how many tax payers are recorded that back up this assumption.

The immediate effects of this huge loss of life on the economy & on government are surprisingly limited. The greater amount of available land (due to deaths of the tenants) and the death toll combined to reduce the number of landless labourers available to work did exert pressure to raise wages for labourers – and similarly for other professions in urban areas. However the government acted to freeze wages to pre-Black Death levels, and the long term economic effects of the population drop don’t show up till after 1360 when these measures began to fail. The mechanics of government and law & order also show surprising resiliance – the effects that show up in the period this book covers are primarily in low tax revenues and greater difficulty fielding large armies. The effects on the Church were greater. With so many dead clergy there weren’t as many truly appropriate candidates as needed to fill the vacancies. However again there was no danger of a collapse of the system. Society in general was also very resilient. There must surely have been an effect on the general population of seeing half the population die in such a short space of time, but Prestwich says it’s difficult to detect in the contemporary sources.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by reminding us that longer term effects were much greater – transforming society during the 15th & 16th Centuries.

Crime and Punishment

The last couple of chapters of this book before the conclusion feel like they don’t quite fit in the flow of the book, but Prestwich felt the subjects were important to cover. The first of these subjects is crime and punishment, and he begins by discussing how it’s difficult to be sure what the crime rates actually were in the 13th & 14th Centuries. There are several factors that complicate the ability of the historian to draw out statistics from the records that survive. One major one is that the population numbers aren’t known, for examples estimates of the population in “medieval London” vary from 37,500 through to 176,000 so expressing homicides as “% of population” is obviously problematic. Another issue is that we have no idea how much crime that was committed was actually reported to the authorities. And for those that are reported and go to court – do you count accusations of crime, or convictions? During this period there’s an 80% acquittal rate so that makes quite a large difference.

But even if accurate numbers are difficult to come by you can look at trends over the period. Civil war led to increases in crime, in part due to people taking advantage of the partial breakdown of government. Political disagreements could turn into outright criminal behaviour – in the 1310s the Earl of Lancaster was involved in what were effectively a couple of private wars both against another Earl and due to rebellion by one of his tenants. This resulted in killings and destruction of property, and a general increase in lawlessness. War in general also increased lawlessness because the administration was focussed on running the war rather than running the country. And wars also lead to an increase in lawlessness in another fashion – the army was often bulked up by releasing men from the county gaols to serve as soldiers. If the war was a foreign one then initially they would be overseas, but on their return crime would increase. Another factor affecting crime rates was the harvest – poor harvests led to increased crime. Almost certainly this was largely due to poor people needing to steal to survive, but contemporary chroniclers also blamed it on men turned out of noble households when money was too tight to pay them who didn’t know how to earn an honest living.

However, criminals during this era weren’t just thugs and desperate poor men. There were several notable gangs lead by members of the gentry – although Prestwich doesn’t mention it this section of the chapter brought the Robin Hood legend to mind. Members of the clergy were also involved in criminal activity. Although sometimes this isn’t so much that somebody actually was a cleric, instead it’s someone who has successfully claimed to be clergy so he’s tried in the church courts rather than the lay ones (punishments were less severe, see below). The senior clergy were also involved in the same sorts of crimes as the nobility – both the gentry gangs and the sorts of fraud and violence indulged in by the aristocracy. Women also committed crimes, but statistically speaking they were different sorts of crime – less violence and more things like receiving stolen goods. They were less often accused of crime in the first place – only about 10% of accusations recorded were of women. Prestwich doesn’t say, but I wonder if this is because women weren’t (entirely?) legally separate from their husbands or fathers.

Maintenance of public order was an important function of medieval government, and there were a variety of mechanisms to achieve this. I got a bit bogged down in the details when this section of the chapter and I’m not quite sure I’ve got a grasp on the big picture. I think Prestwich discusses country wide courts first. At the start of the period are courts called “eyres” which aren’t popular (I’m not sure why) and their use decreases over time – this was a regular visitation by royal justices to the whole country, which theoretically happened every 7 years. It appears you could pay a fine (collectively) to avoid having one sit in your town, and later kings were more interested in getting the fines than actually holding the courts. As they faded out of use other alternatives arose. One of these was that litigants could take civil cases to Westminster to the court of the Common Bench. The assizes circuits, which start from 1273, were another alternative for civil cases. Criminal case were passed to the justices of gaol delivery, or to specially commissioned oyer and terminer courts (“to hear and determine”). During this period there was also increasing use of Keepers of the Peace, a role that eventually developed into Justice of the Peace. These were local men, normally magnates or knights, who were employed to hold courts when the assizes justices weren’t able to complete their circuits (during times of war for instance when money would be diverted from domestic matters).

The courts were more effective in theory than in practice. Convictions did not often happen, wrongdoers might misuse the legal system to accuse their victims (frequently successfully to at least some extent). Although there is no widespread evidence for bribing or intimidating juries they often failed to convict people even when there appears to be much evidence for their crimes. Prestwich speculates that maybe in some cases they were put off by the harsh penalties that would be applied to a convicted criminal. Men could also escape severe punishment if they successfully claimed to be clerics, sometimes they had to take a reading test but more often they just had to have the bishop’s official agree with them. Which is obviously open to corruption! Clerics were tried in the episcopal courts which didn’t hand out as severe penalties as the secular ones. Some of the accused never appear in court, having fled before the case was heard – there’s generally a higher conviction rate in those cases.

Punishments varied. Hanging was the usual punishment for a felony. At the beginning of the period even minor thefts could end up with a hanging, but in 1279 a statute was passed setting a minimum value for imposing this felony. Pillorying was a common punishment for those sorts of minor crimes. If you refused to plead you could be punished by peine forte et dure, ie crushed by heavy rocks – which meant your family could inherit your property (unlike if you’d been convicted and hung). Imprisonment was also often used for minor crimes, or for when a fine could not be paid.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by noting that although the problem of crime & punishment during the period was great there was nonetheless no complete breakdown of law & order. He also relates an anecdote that hints at the romanticisation of crime that would lead to later legends like that of Robin Hood, or the concept of dashing highwaymen.

Trade and Merchants

Trade, both locally and internationally, was an important part of the 13th & 14th Century English economy. Prestwich starts this chapter by talking about the types and volumes of trade during the period. The wool trade was the most significant – at its peak in the early 14th Century around 40,000 sacks of wool were exported per year, the equivalent of around 10 million sheep. This brought in large sums of money to the economy, in 1297 Edward I’s opponents were able to realistically claim that wool was half the country’s wealth. Wool was not the only commodity traded, the wine trade (of Gascony wines) was also important and other goods were traded too. These included cloth (mostly imports), dyes, timber, tin, lead, grain and many other foodstuffs. International trade was obviously affected by wars – not just because of breakdown in relations but also because the Channel crossing became more risky. Trade was also involved in causing wars, disputes between merchants (particularly at sea) could draw in governments.

Trade and the government were linked together in more than one way. Merchants could become prominent at court, and could influence politics. In part because the trade was important to the economy, so keeping merchants sweet was important. And in part because they could provide funds to the Crown, which was a role Italian merchants often filled. Trade was also subject to government regulation and interference, particularly the wool trade. At times the government would propose to seize wool and sell it themselves, so that the profit came to the Crown rather than the merchants – unsurprisingly not a popular move, and frequently the number of sacks successfully seized was far less than hoped for. Over this period customs duties became a more successful way to raise funds for the Crown, and in 1275 a permanent customs system was established. Taxing trade in this way meant that merchants were at times invited to parliament along with the knights and barons. Prestwich says that during Edward III’s reign there were attempts to negotiate customs with a separate assembly consisting just of the merchants – if these had proved successful then the shape of our government might look different today, with a third house to go along with the Lords & the Commons. However the merchant assemblies were an imposition from the King rather than a natural outgrowth of any sort of coherent merchant community. After a few experiments negotiation of customs duties was returned to Parliament.

The elite merchants of the era were Italians, they were in England primarily to trade in wool. As they could draw on the resources of their internationally trading companies they were able to take bigger risks than the English merchants. They were in a position to offer long term arrangements and even loans (often to monasteries) which would be paid back in wool over a long period of time – one such deal involved a monastery providing 140 sacks of wool over a 20 year period with the Italian company paying 20 marks per year (a good price from the Italian point of view). Although they couldn’t charge interest on loans (Christians were forbidden to do so by the Pope) they could accept “payments to cover costs incurred by making the loan”. They also profited from exchange rates – by making a loan in one currency and asking for repayments in another at a favourable rate to themselves. The larger Italian companies often got sucked into making huge loans to the Crown – these played an important role in financing the wars of the English throughout the period. And these loans played a big role in the bankruptcy of the companies who made the loans. Not always because the loans weren’t repaid in full, sometimes the changing political situation meant a company went out of favour (and lost business) because of close ties to hated previous regime.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by considering the English merchants of the time. Towards the end of this period the involvement of the English in large scale trade increased, although it’s not clear why this happened. Small scale trade is much harder to analyse historically – most of the records are about the wealthiest merchants, particularly those who lent money to the Crown. Tax returns can shed some light on smaller merchants in towns but even then it can be hard to tell the different between a manufacturer of goods and someone who is also selling the goods he makes. So overall not much is known about the English merchants of the time.

The Towns

Having covered the landowners and the rural populace in previous chapters Prestwich now moves on to the urban population of England at this time. He starts by considering how to define a town, which as with so many things in historical research isn’t as easy as it might sound. At first sight one might think it easiest to just use whatever designations the contemporary population used – only they weren’t particularly consistent and places are referred to differently in different documents and at different times. One possible criterion is which places sent representatives to parliament – but this varies from parliament to parliament. Or perhaps use taxation status – but then there’s the example of Boston in Lincolnshire which was still taxed as a village even when it was the fifth wealthiest place in England and the second largest port for wool exports. Legal definitions can include looking at the sort of tenure that the land was held by – but some places used burgage tenure when they weren’t actually towns by any other definition. A possible economic definition is that in a town most people should be involved in trade and manufacturing, rather than agriculture – again this works much better in theory than it does when you look at specific examples.

Taking the various criteria together and applying some judgement to the results Prestwich arrives at an approximation of 100-150 towns in England in this period, with a further 500 places that had some urban characteristics. This wasn’t a static figure, and in fact the 13th Century was a period where many new towns were established (not all of which were successful). Turning a village into a town, or starting one de novo, was good for a landlord as the revenue from a town in terms of tolls and taxes was much higher than for a rural community. New Salisbury is an example of a successful town foundation from this time. Later in the period this book covers there were fewer new town foundations – the potential urban population was already living in towns, so it was harder to attract settlers to a new one. The economy was also in a poorer state in the early 14th Century so there wasn’t as much fervour for new costly projects.

Prestwich moves on to discuss the townspeople themselves. If it’s hard to count towns, it’s even harder to count their population. The evidence for the people who lived in towns is even more scarce than for their rural contemporaries. By modern standards they were pretty small – London was the largest and the only one that was comparable to the great Continental cities of the time. It probably had a population of somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 in 1300, Prestwich says 70,000 seems a reasonable estimate. For reference and comparison the populations of some towns I’ve lived in are (according to wikipedia, in 2011): Oxford – 150,200; Cambridge – 122,700; Ipswich – 133,400. I don’t think of any of those as “all that big” and yet even the highest estimates for London in 1300 are far short of those three towns today.

The population of a town of the period probably wasn’t self-sustaining – conditions were less healthy than in the country, and people tended to die off more quickly. So towns effectively had a catchment area where new immigrants moved from, the size of which depended on the size and prestige of the town. The makeup of the urban population wasn’t the same as the rural population – the higher levels of society didn’t live in towns (although barons might have a town house in London). There were no villeins or unfree people in towns, either – in fact living in a town for a year and a day conferred freedom regardless of your previous status. The townspeople weren’t homogenous, however. They thought of themselves as divided into 3 sorts – the great men, those of middling status and the poor. The great men might be very wealthy merchants, trading internationally. The artisans and smaller traders would be the middling sort. There was a greater variety of occupations in a town than in a village, a lot of which were to do with production and sale of food and drink. Prior to their expulsion from the country in 1290 the Jews were also a significant feature of towns. They were among the wealthier inhabitants, due to their ability to lend money at interest (which was forbidden to Christians). And even prior to the worst persecution they were poorly treated by the rest of the community and kept themselves to themselves as not really a part of the town community.

Towns were frequently self-governing and separate from the county system. This was more likely to be the case if the landlord was the King – if the landlord was a lord he was more likely to want the increased prestige & authority that came with direct control. Relations between town (self-governing or not) and landlord weren’t always smooth with records of rebellions and of court cases. Conflict also occurred within the town community (unsurprisingly), sometimes arising from class conflicts and other times from more personal quarrels. Often the wealthy elite of the town would come into conflict with the rest of the townspeople by using their wealth and social/political status to ensure they got the best trading opportunities etc.

Towns were important in the medieval economy. In spite of being separate in some legal senses they were a critical part of the overall economy of the country. One way in which they were important for the rural economy was in consuming food. This need to feed the urban population had a significant effect on the viability of agriculture as a way for the rural population to support themselves (beyond subsistence). Towns also provided opportunities for people to specialise in particular manufacturing trades – providing a place to sell your goods as well as support yourself while doing so (like having more places to buy food etc). Towns also hosted markets and annual trading fairs, both of which made them into trading hubs for a wider area.

Guilds and fraternities were an important part of urban organisation & economy, but there’s not that much evidence left about them. They mostly appear to’ve been formed during the 13th Century (Prestwich says 14th but then contradicts himself so I think that was a mistake) – at the beginning of the 13th Century most towns had a guild merchant and a weaver’s guild, by the early 14th Century there are records of more diverse guilds. London guilds were formed earlier, and also suppressed at various times due to being a threat to the pre-existing power structure of the city. Guilds in general protected trades and crafts, while also providing a social focus.

Towns had lots of regulations and laws – due to being crowded places. Prestwich gives several examples of rules about sanitation and building regulations. Pest control also was important – although not always how you might think. For instance there were regulations against shooting pigeons in London in the 1320s, because the arrows and stones used tended to break windows or injure people. Public order needed to be maintained, too – including many attempts to drive out prostitutes, a particularly urban problem.

Religious life in towns was also important – with many parish churches, fraternities and friaries in towns. Friars were generally an urban phenomenon as basing themselves in towns meant they could preach to the greatest numbers of people.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by considering the impact of war on towns during this time period. For inland towns there’s not much effect but ports were more significantly impacted. Both by the requirements of the Crown for shipping, and by raids by the French.

The Peasantry

The bulk of the population of England during the period this book covers were peasants, who are the subject of this chapter of the book. Peasants generally lived in small two-generation family households – i.e. a couple and their three or four children. They lived in villages, and as well as farming their own plots would either work for or make cash payments to the owner of the manor on which they worked. They worshipped at their local parish church. In some areas the village, manor and parish were the same thing but in other areas there might be multiple villages per manor or vice versa. The same could be true for the relationship between parishes & villages.

Peasants were not all the same. One important distinction was between free and unfree peasants. The latter, also known as villeins, were liable to perform labour services for a lord and had many restrictions on their lives – effectively they were their lord’s property or chattels. They had to pay fines to their lord on a variety of occasions (such as when inheriting their father’s land or marrying). Although in practice many of the restrictions were more theoretical than actual there was still a great social stigma attached to being unfree. The labour services owed varied by manor, and might be to do particular work or to do a particular number of days work. It didn’t necessarily have to be done personally – a wealthy villein might be obliged to provide so many men to do the work. Often, and increasingly over the period, these services were commuted to cash payments – it was better for all sides of the agreement for the lord to hire willing labourers rather than force the villeins to do the job themselves. The labour services weren’t without recompense – generally the lord was required to provide food for the days when the men were doing labour for him.

Peasant landholdings weren’t static. Inheritance was generally by primogeniture or ultimogeniture (first or last son inherits all respectively). So this meant that the other sons had to be provided for somehow – and this was often done by buying and selling land (even by villeins although technically this was forbidden to them). This was also profitable for the lord – they charged entry fines when someone took over a landholding whether by inheritance, buying it or leasing it.

Most of the records that survive about the peasantry concern those who have land. As such women are proportionally under-represented. It’s clear that widows and single women had more legal independence than married women. Some information about the lives of women can also be gleaned from records such as coroner’s rolls recording accidental deaths. Women tended to be more involved in domestic matters than men – ie more women died drawing water, more men were involved in carting accidents. Gender played a huge role in determining occupation – agricultural work was primarily for men, baking and butchering were also male jobs. Brewing, however, was dominated by women. Landless peasants also don’t show up in the records much and Prestwich says that the existence of such people is a matter of deduction by historians. One source of information is records kept by the nobility about almsgiving.

Over the 13th Century the economy expanded and so did the population. Prestwich poses the question of whether living standards went up for the peasantry over this time or not – and comes to the conclusion that there is no single answer. Some areas did well overall, some did not. And within an area there were winners & losers at the individual level. One trend is that there is increasing social differentiation between peasants during this period. In general, however, the peasantry didn’t do as well out of the economic boom as the aristocracy did. In the early 14th Century the economic good times came to an end – the weather got worse, there were more famines. The peasants bore the brunt of this.

There is surprisingly little organised or successful resistance to the demands of the aristocracy on the peasants. What there was was generally pursued through the courts – the peasants normally lost, but clearly they felt they had the right to justice from the courts rather than needing to take things into their own hands. The peasants also seem generally litigious – Prestwich discusses village life by drawing out several anecdotes from legal cases between villagers. Lots of petty neighbourhood disputes go to the courts, and causing problems and stirring up trouble in the village could eventually lead to expulsion from the village.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by thinking about the effects of the wider world on the peasants – in the form of war and politics. In a lot of cases the wider world had little impact on any given peasant’s life. But the demands for fighting men and for food to support the armies would have a significant impact. These lead to a degree of resentment against the Crown, but this still did not boil over into outright rebellion – Prestwich suggests this is through a lack of leadership.

Having discussed the two categories of people who owned the bulk of the land in the last two chapters Prestwich now moves on to discussing landownership itself (and the law surrounding it) and land management. He does this in two separate chapters, but I’ll cover them both in the same post (in part because it’s been a while since I read them).

Landownership and the Law

Who owned the land, who could inherit it and who had what rights associated with it were obviously important to the people of the time. Disputes frequently ended up in court, so a knowledge of the law and how to use it to your advantage were useful skills to acquire.

Prestwich first considers how people acquired land. Marriage was the easiest route, and there are many examples of men who acquired wealth by marrying well (Simon de Montfort for instance). As a result marriages often involved complicated arrangements about the transfer of land from father of the bride to groom, from groom to bride (as a dower) and jointures could be set in place to ensure that the land would be inherited by the children of the couple. It was also possible to gain land via royal favour – but this might not be as secure or long lasting as you might hope! Even if you stayed in the King’s good graces you might still end up giving the land back if the previous holder (or his heirs) made a good case for why they’d been wrongly disinherited.

And finally one could purchase land, or lease land. This wasn’t always a straightforward transfer of money in exchange for land. Prestwich details one purchase mechanism which was particularly unpopular – land that had been mortgaged to a Jewish moneylender could be bought by someone (often a religious house) paying off the debt. So the Church was in effect profiting from the practice of usury (these lands would not otherwise have been available to buy), which is somewhat hypocritical. Another way to buy land was to buy a reversion – on the death of the owner you would inherit rather than the owner’s heirs.

So given that the transfer of land could be complicated, and the relationships between landlord & tenant could be tense, it’s not surprising that lawyers were important in securing one’s rights. There also arose a practice of bringing a fictitious dispute to court, which then would be ruled on and the resulting documents would provide binding proof of land ownership. And during the period covered by this book the legal system surrounding landownership got increasingly complex – in part to counter various ways in which great landlords could lose income through the ways that their (lesser landlord) tenants disposed of their land. One practice legislated against was granting land to the Church – because the Church never died and never inherited whilst underage two sources of potential income were removed from a landowner (normally there would be fees to pay your landlord in such situations).

Another part of the complex legal situation surrounding landownership & use were the mechanisms to ensure that the land was inherited in the way the original (or current) owner intended even generations after his death. For instance the way that male & female inheritance worked meant that the practice of restricting inheritance “in tail male” arose. In the general case, if a landowner died and had no male heirs his estate would be divided between all his female heirs – thus an estate could fragment to a potentially unsustainable degree. So if the land was entailed such that it must be inherited only be a male heir, then in the event of a landowner only having daughters the estate would be kept together and go to the nearest male heir. Which would be bad for the daughters who now got nothing (although they were presumably supposed to marry and be reliant on their husband’s estate) but it did mean that a smallish estate wouldn’t disintegrate to a point where no-one could live off the proceeds. You could also control inheritance by granting your lands away to someone else, who would then permit you to use the lands for the rest of your life. And you’d set up the legal framework of the initial grant to ensure that the new owner was then required to permit your designated heir use for his life and so on. These enfeoffments could be for a limited term, for instance if you were going to war and wanted to ensure your affairs were properly taken care of in the event of your death in battle, but wanted control back if you returned alive.

Prestwich finishes this chapter by considering how well this complex legal system surrounding landownership actually worked in practice. He suggests that its very complexity might’ve been a part of the purpose. If there was always some other legal approach you could try in order to resolve your disputes, then conflict would be less likely to descend into violence.

The Management of Land

The point of owning land, and why it was worth pursuing through all the legal complexity, was to make a profit from it and live off that profit. And to do that the land must be managed. Prestwich starts this chapter by defining the two main ways to do this – either rent out the manors to people (or person) who pay a fixed rent or directly manage the land and take all the proceeds. (The distinction isn’t quite as clear as that sounds because even directly managed land had tenants who paid rent.)

Rents were generally fixed over long periods, so in times of higher inflation it made more sense to directly manage your land. This was the case during the late 12th Century and may explain why there had been a countrywide movement towards direct management of estates. During the 13th Century there was a steady level of inflation across the century, with a lot of short term fluctuation, so this might explain the continued preference for direct management. However Prestwich is dubious that long term price changes would have quite such an impact. Other factors influencing this include the fact that the Church preferred direct management (in part because farming out the land to monks had proved to leave too many of them away from the regulations of monastic life). The existence of a developed market economy at which to sell the surplus you were hoping to generate would also influence landowners to go for direct management. And of course if you take the profits in directly then you don’t risk having tenants fail to pay their rent, which then would require the costs of a court case to recover.

This was a period during which the methods of estate management were both revolutionised, and systematically taught. This meant that landlords choosing to directly manage their estates could employ stewards and bailiffs who were well trained and efficient. There was an extensive literature on the subject of estate management, which was widely disseminated – Prestwich discusses several treatises covering accountancy, farming practice and so on. These treatises also gave a landowner yardsticks by which to measure the performance of their steward. Accountancy appears to’ve been fairly well standardised by this time, the surviving records are remarkably similar across different sizes of properties and different regions of the country. Farming methods, however, varied by region – understandably so, as crops and livestock suitable for one area are not necessarily suitable for a different one. In general investment in an estate was geared to maximising returns in the short term rather than improving the estate.

The above is all about the 13th Century, but these good conditions could not last. War, poor harvests, and terrible weather are all things which began to change conditions from around 1290. There is also the possibility that the expansion of agriculture during the good times had started to exhaust the land in some estates. And so there was a gradual move towards leasing the land to tenants for the security of a fixed rent. Obviously any consideration of economic conditions in the first two-thirds of the 14th Century has to consider the Black Death in 1348. Whilst the immediate effects made life more difficult for landlords it seems they were able to work around these to some degree. For instance increased labour costs lead to landlords insisting on labour service from their peasant tenants instead of commuting it to a cash payment as had become customary. So during the period that is the scope of this book (up to 1360) the effects of the Black Death on the economy were mostly masked by short term fixes.

I’m about 3 chapters behind in writing up what I’ve read of this book – this summer has been rather busy! After the great lords Prestwich moves a step down the social scale to consider the lesser aristocracy.

The Knights and the Gentry

In contrast to the great lords (or the gentry) knights are easy to define – a knight has been through a formal process of being knighted. He gets to be addressed as “dominus” (lord), and was expected to be capable of bearing arms. Knighthood isn’t hereditary per se but the sons of knights were generally expected to become knights themselves. Generally a knight got paid more in war than a squire would (double the rate normally), he was also expected to undertake various legal and administrative duties in the country he lived in.

Despite the clear definition Prestwich says that “knights are not as easy to count as sheep”, which I found an amusing turn of phrase 🙂 Some knights are mentioned in some sources and not others, and there is no central record of who was a knight (nor even local records – when counties were asked to provide lists of knights these could vary substantially between years in ways that don’t make sense as actual changes).

The number of knights in England dropped over the first half of the 13th Century for reasons that are not entirely clear particularly as this is an era of rising population and economic prosperity (relatively speaking). There may’ve been some effect of the rising cost of military equipment, but Prestwich thinks this is not particularly significant – it correlates with rising wages for knights, but probably doesn’t cause the falling numbers of knights. As the number of knights fell the status and the duties of those left rose, as one might expect. The expectations of chivalric behaviour increased along with their role in local administration. Prestwich says there isn’t evidence of families who used to be knights resenting their loss of status – rather that there is a reluctance to take on the expense and hard work.

Later in the 13th Century life got easier for the knightly families. Prestwich associates this with the reduction in easy credit – with the Jews first less able to lend money and subsequently expelled in 1290. As well as this changes in the law meant it was harder for the Church to buy up land from knights. And other changes in the legal system meant that the duties of a knight in his county’s administration were shared with other people and so became less onerous. Prestwich also notes that a man who was knighted on the eve of battle didn’t have to pay for as elaborate a ceremony and there were several convenient battles during the later part of this period. The crown was generally concerned to ensure sufficient knights to perform the duties required of them, and at various points incentives and rewards were given to knights as part of the patronage system. There were also sometimes mass knighting ceremonies (which again would reduce costs for each individual knight).

Prestwich next moves on to the “gentry” or esquires. In the period covered by the book this social class was gradually becoming delineated, and the terms gentle born (gentiz) or gentlemen (gentis hommes) might be used. From the mid-14th Century esquire became more common as a term, too. These people can be roughly categorised as men who could be knights but weren’t – in terms of wealth and social standing it’s difficult to distinguish the groups, it’s the ceremony of knighthood that’s key. As numbers of knights dropped, and as numbers of knights who succeeded in getting exemptions from the legal & social duties rose, the numbers of esquires performing those duties increased. These include offices such as that of sheriff, coroner, forester and so on. And as well as this they served on assizes, in juries etc. At various points laws were issued to try and make sure that actual knights fulfilled the roles, but in practice it was the county elite regardless of whether or not they’d been knighted.

The county “communitas” or community can be seen as providing the essential horizontal links between the gentry & knights in society. The idea is that while ties to one’s lord or tenants provide the vertical links unifying the whole population of the country, the elite in a particular county have a sense of identity as the community of that county. Prestwich seems a bit sceptical about how important that actually was. He agrees that in terms of administration the county was very important. It was the building block for the taxation system and for the legal system. However he suggests that the way that the great lordships didn’t match up with the counties meant that the ties within the county communities were weaker than you might expect. Lists of knights for particular counties sometimes vary significantly from year to year as to whether a particular individual is part of this county or that. Knights might attend parliament as representatives of different counties in different years, rather than identifying themselves with one place & community.

Prestwich finishes the chapter by talking about how the knights and the gentry distinguished themselves as a social elite. He calls this section “Symbols of Knighthood” which seems a bit of misnomer as it covers rather more than that. But he does open with heraldic insignia – the coat of arms was increasingly a vital signal of one’s status. The earliest surviving heraldic rolls date from the mid-13th Century and they don’t list all that many coats of arms each (e.g. 211 in Glover’s Roll, 677 in St George’s Roll from the 1280s) but across them all there are 2100 people mentioned as having coats of arms during Edward I’s reign (1272-1307) which is likely to include most or all of the knightly families. People below the rank of knight were generally not listed on the rolls, but Prestwich notes that a law in 1292 requiring esquires to use their lord’s arms suggests that some esquires were using their own. Otherwise why make a law against it. And by the 1320s there is evidence of many esquires having seals with a personal coat of arms, so they probably used them in the various other ways on clothing and so on. This again indicates the way that esquires and knights had very similar standing in society, despite the clear line between the two.

As well as coats of arms Prestwich looks at other ways that knights and esquires indicated their status. Their houses were, obviously, much less impressive than those of the earls and barons. But even tho not many have survived records indicate they often had moats or impressive looking towers – but ones that seem more for show than for defensive use. Culturally speaking the knights and esquires weren’t all that much different from their aristocratic superiors – and again it’s difficult to say much about the group as a whole, because there were many differences between individuals. Generally they were literate, educated and at least as pious as any other level of society.

The last section of the book I’m reading about Plantagenet England is about the society and people of the era. Prestwich starts the first chapter in this section by noting that whilst society was very stratified in this period the boundaries weren’t rigid and well defined (or least not in ways that historians can be sure of now). However, you can divide the society at this time into four rough groups – the great lords (both lay & church), the knights, the peasants and the merchants. This chapter deals with the first of those groups.

The Great Lords

The great lords were the higher nobility and there are a variety of phrases used in official documents of the time that can define them to one extent or another. The “prelates, earls and barons” is one, the “magnates and nobles” is another, or “earls, barons and magnates”. Also “magnates” can be used on its own. It’s easy to work out who the earls and the bishops are from the surviving documents, and they are well defined – it’s a specific title generally relating to a place.

The earls were the elite of the nobility. There were 30 titles during this period (1225-1360) not all of which were in existence for the whole time, and some individuals could hold multiple earldoms. This means there were very few earls at any one time – for instance in 1300 there were 9. The title itself was mostly honourific – they had few special duties and not much extra income from earldom related sources. Because of their status they had to attend the king when required, and were always summoned to parliament whenever it met. Some earldoms came with ceremonial duties (like carrying a particular sword during the coronation), some had military ranks attached (i.e. the earls of Norfolk and Hereford held the office of Marshal and of Constable during this period). So being an earl was mostly about status – one of the things that so annoyed the earls about Gaveston was his habit of giving rude nicknames to (other) earls. So rather than talking about (the earl of) Lincoln he would refer to “Burstbelly”.

Earls were wealthy – newly created earls were generally granted lands worth around 1,000 marks/year, which gives a feel for the minimum appropriate wealth (1 mark is 2/3 of a £). The title of an earl (which he was referred to by) related to a specific county, but that wasn’t necessarily where the earl held most lands. They also had symbolic swords, granted along with the title. During the 14th Century they started to wear coronets, and they were permitted the most costly clothing (like cloth of gold trimmed in ermine). Generally they also made much of their heraldic symbols, and used them to decorate their possessions and clothing.

During this period there wasn’t much continuity in the various titles. If there was no direct male heir, the family name died out and the lands (and titles) would be divided amongst the female heirs. That wrinkle in how inheritance worked was something I’d not learnt before – primogeniture for sons, but divided for daughters. Prestwich looks at the statistics for earldoms being extinguished (no valid heirs) and comes to the conclusion that whilst there seems to be an unusually high number of sonless and childless families, that’s probably just by chance as it’s such a small sample group rather than due to any underlying cause. Prestwich also spends a couple of pages considering the royal attitude towards extinguishing and granting earldoms. Events in Henry III’s reign encouraged Edward I to be very conservative about creating new earldoms, and to be keen to control the power of those that existed. Edward II and Edward III had more need to create new earldoms, because they had family to provide for. It was also important for the King to have enough earls – being accompanied by several earls enhanced the prestige of the King’s court, particularly important on foreign trips. And there was a general policy of granting earldoms to those related by blood to the royal family, in the hope this would keep them loyal.

There’s not much in the sources about the countesses, but what there is tends to indicate that these high status & wealth women had some influence on the events of the day. Which is not surprising, but frustrating that we don’t know more about them. Prestwich talks about several notable women. Most of what is known about them revolves around their marriages, as you’d expect in chronicles from this era. But widows (of men with no heirs) could live out their lives as the landowner & head of their estates – and their power in this area was as much as any man’s, just they had much less power in politics.

Next down the social tree from earls were barons. Being a baron didn’t confer any rights or powers, rather it imposed some requirements on you (like paying a particular tax) so it wasn’t necessarily something people wanted. Barons did have a voice in parliament, which was formally recognised. For instance in the Ordinances of 1311 many matters were set down as requiring “the consent of the baronage”. Inconveniently for the later historian not all barons were summoned individually to parliament, so there aren’t complete lists surviving. The numbers who did get individual summons varied between a low point of around 30 to a high point of around 80. Generally Baron wasn’t used as a title, those who were barons tended to go by “Lord” and can be hard to distinguish from knights. As a result it’s difficult for the modern historian to be sure how many there were, or who exactly they were. Prestwich notes that one thorough survey (by a historian who published it in 1927) came up with 135 baronies, plus another 72 probables. So this is still a relatively small elite. Again the inheritance was by primogeniture for sons, but divided if there were only daughters – so sometimes baronies fractured into smaller pieces which may’ve all had the same baronial status. There was a reasonable amount of social mobility into the baronial class, with knights who distinguished themselves in battle or supported the right earl during a domestic conflict standing a chance of being granted lands that would confer that status.

Adjacent to the secular hierarchy was the clerical one. In the category of great lords we have the archbishops, the bishops and the greater abbots. Archbishops and bishops are well defined, but as with the barons the “greater abbots” are less clear. Not all of these men were of aristocratic birth, it was definitely possible to rise through the ranks as a clergyman. Bishoprics were often handed out as rewards to men who had held government posts. Some bishops were exceedingly wealthy, on a par with earls, others less so. The greater abbots were summoned to parliament, but otherwise their political role was relatively unimportant. Again they were often wealthy. The sources of the time judge abbots on their ability as manager of their monastic estates.

These great lords did not have a fixed address – the great lived in households which moved around between their various houses and court. The household comprised all the furnishing and so on that the lord moved with him, as well as his staff. Even a relatively low status member of the elite might have 25 staff in his household, spread throughout the various departments. This number doesn’t include any knights or men-at-arms who were retained, nor people like huntsmen or carters. A large household plus other employees for an important magnate might run to 200 or more. As well as the size of the household depending on the status of the lord, over the time period that this book covers there was a general increase in the size of the magnates’ households. Staff were generally provided with robes, and with food whilst at the household. They would also get wages, which might be paid by giving them the right to the rents from a particular estate.

Prestwich discusses in detail how this era had a mix of traditional feudalism and what’s known as “bastard feudalism”. In the first, the retainer holds lands from his lord and owes him service for them. In the latter, the retainer is rewarded for his service by cash (which may be rent from an estate). The two systems existed side by side during this period, and Prestwich is quite clear that he doesn’t see it as a transition from one system to another.

The castles and manor houses that these great lords built & lived in were overt expressions of their power. Although there weren’t any explicit restrictions on who could build a castle, it took wealth to do so. Generally the great lords built new fashionable residences when they could, but it wasn’t seen as necessary – more something to do when one could afford it. During this period residences were becoming more comfortable and less defensive, although it’s the military aspects that survive to the present day (being built from stone instead of wood).

The ceremonies surrounding death were another way for a magnate’s family to indicate their status. Elaborate funerals were important, as were ostentatious memorials (such as gravestones and monuments). Families tended to be buried in the same church for generations, although this could lead to arguments particularly in the case of women who had married more than once. Prestwich gives the example of Isabella (daughter of William Marshal) who married three times, and ended up with her body buried in Beaulieu, her heart in Tewkesbury and her entrails in Missenden. Other people worried about the anticipated bodily resurrection at the Last Judgement – sometimes a person was buried in multiple places, then later their body would be gathered back up by a relative to be reburied in one place. Also important for religious reasons was to provide money for services to be held after death, to ensure a short stay in Purgatory.

Prestwich ends the chapter by being a little scathing about anyone either contemporary or modern who tries to draw conclusions about “all the great lords”, because there’s too much variance between the individuals. The stereotype is of boneheaded brawlers, and some do fit this characterisation. Others don’t, in a variety of ways.