Peasants Making History Christopher

Dyer
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Peasants Making History
 Peasants Making History
Living in an English Region 1200–1540

C H R I S TO P H E R DY E R
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 Contents

List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Notes on boundaries and measures
Abbreviations

1. Introduction

2. Peasants and landscapes

The west-midland region
Human impacts on the land
Lords and landscapes
Peasants and the making of the landscape
Peasants, lords, and the changing landscape after 1350
Conclusion

3. Peasant society: Landholding and status

Holding land before 1349
Changing circumstances: Entry fines
Landholding 1349–1540
Serfdom, 1200–1540
Conclusion

4. Peasants changing society

Migration
Social mobility
Poverty
Village community
Conclusion
5. Family and household
The size and composition of the household
Space for households
The character of family life
Conclusion

6. Peasants and their crops

Fields and their regulation
Changing agriculture: Managing the fields
Crops and their use
Arable husbandry
Farming methods and techniques
Conclusion on husbandry and techniques
Arable and pasture: Managing change
Conclusion

7. Peasant farming: Livestock and pasture

Horses
Cattle
Sheep
Goats
Pigs
Poultry
Bees
Animal husbandry on the peasant holding
Animal welfare
Marketing animals and animal products
Conclusion

8. Peasants and towns

Origins of towns
Peasant migration into towns
Occupations and commerce: Peasant influence on towns
Peasant consumption and towns
Peasants and changing fortunes of towns
Peasants and money
 Town and country: Cultural connections
Conclusion

9. Peasants and industry

The role of lords in creating industry
Urban entrepreneurs and rural industry
Poverty and industry
Industry within peasant society
Conclusion

10. Peasant outlook, values, perceptions, and attitudes

Piers Plowman
Peasants and the state
Peasants and lords
Peasants and religion
Peasants and the environment
Individuals and communities
Conclusion

Conclusion

Glossary
Bibliography
Index
 List of figures

2.1 Topography of the west midland region

2.2 Landscape divisions of the west midland region
2.3 Pendock, Worcestershire
2.4 Aston Blank, Gloucestershire
2.5 Westcote in Tysoe, Warwickshire
2.6 Northfield, Worcestershire
2.7 Malvern Hills and adjoining parishes
2.8 Ufton, Warwickshire
2.9 Wolverley, Worcestershire
.10 Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire
3.1 Gloucestershire. Places named
3.2 Warwickshire. Places named
3.3 Worcestershire. Places named
4.1 Continuity of names at Romsley, Worcestershire
4.2 Migration patterns in Warwickshire, 1279–1332
5.1 Plans of house plots
5.2 Plans of excavated houses (Burton Dassett Southend, Upton,
Pinbury, Coton)
5.3 Standing buildings (Stoneleigh, Defford)
6.1 Compton Verney, Warwickshire
6.2 Crops from tithe receipts, mainly Worcestershire
6.3 Peasant barns, Burton Dassett Southend
6.4 Cleeve Prior, Worcestershire
7.1 Remote pastures, transhumance, and droving
8.1 Towns in the west midlands
8.2 Plan of Coleshill, Warwickshire
8.3 Plan of Alcester, Warwickshire
8.4 Migration into Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire
8.5 Origins of apprentices at Bristol, 1532–9
8.6 Hinterland of Alcester
9.1 Industries in the region
9.2 Smith’s tenement at Burton Dassett Southend
9.3 Distribution of fulling mills
9.4 Hanley Castle. Potters in a landscape
9.5 Masons and carpenters in Worcestershire in 1275
0.1 Halesowen parish
0.2 Woods in Balsall and Berkswell, Warwickshire
 List of tables

3.1 Transfers of free land

3.2 Subletting arrangements on Worcester Priory manors
3.3 Entry fines on two Worcester Priory manors
3.4 Transfers of land between tenants on the Worcester Cathedral
Priory estate
3.5 Transfers of land by surrender and grant
4.1 Distances between taxpayers’ locations, and the places from
which their surnames derive
4.2 Distances from home manor to destinations of nativi
4.3 Holdings of land linked with those identified as paupers in
manorial records, 1200–1540
5.1 Servants taxed in 1525
5.2 Moral offences reported to west midland church courts
6.1 Land use in Gloucestershire from final concords
6.2 Reduction in the quantity of crops
7.1 Estimates of the size of the flocks of those selling wool to John
Heritage
8.1 Occupations in Alcester
8.2 Peasant possessions, classified by materials
8.3 Households and expenditure in the hinterland of Alcester
8.4 Single coin finds from Warwickshire
8.5 Single coin finds from Alcester parish
0.1 Tax assessments at Brandon, Warwickshire
 Preface

This book is the result of research over many years, and in

acknowledging help that has been received I will focus on those who
have participated or have given advice in the period of active
preparation since 2011. Initial progress was made possible by a
Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship for which I was grateful
because it enabled me to visit archives intensively, and to gain from
the reliable and skilful services of Matthew Tompkins. The Aurelius
Charitable Trust funded the preparation of the figures, which were
drawn expertly by Andy Isham. During the period of preparation, I
became involved in a number of short-term projects which were
relevant to the themes of the book. They encouraged me to embark
on specialized aspects of my theme, and stimulated me with
contacts with other scholars. These included work on the
Inquisitions Post Mortem on a project led by Michael Hicks, and
investigations of social mobility with Sandro Carocci. Conference
papers at the University of Western Australia and the Leeds Medieval
Congress made me pull together my thinking about poverty. I learnt
more about open fields from a symposium hosted by Erik Thoen,
and I found the discussions on serfdom at the Anglo-American
conference organized by Phillipp Schofield in 2019 very helpful. The
theme of migration figures prominently in this book mainly because
of my involvement in a project devised by Jo Story and the late Mark
Ormrod. Umberto Albarella, by inviting me to a conference on the
archaeology of birds, encouraged me to study poultry more closely.
Invitations to contribute to conferences and books by Phillipp
Schofield and Martin Allen encouraged me to work on tithes and
earnings. Early versions of Chapter 2 were delivered in a lecture to
the Institute of Historical Research, a lecture at Taunton in memory
of Mick Aston, and to the Friends of the Centre for English Local
History at Leicester. Parts of other chapters were given to the
economic history seminars at Cambridge and the London School of
Economics, and in presentations to the Institute of Archaeology in
London, the Flaran conference, and the Berne conference of the
European Agricultural History Organisation.
This is a book about a region, and I have always welcomed the
opportunity to talk to local societies and groups, who have
sometimes allowed me to try out the general themes of this book;
for example, at occasions organized by the Bristol and
Gloucestershire Archaeological Society and the Worcestershire
Archaeological Society, and also by the Nuneaton branch of the
Historical Association and the Gotherington Local History Society.
Invitations from the local history societies and heritage groups at
Alcester, Bidford-on-Avon, Chipping Campden, the Forest of Dean,
Thornbury, Welford-on-Avon, Winterbourne, Yate (near Chipping
Sodbury), and the Victoria County History Trust of Herefordshire,
have all encouraged me to focus enquiries on particular places and
themes, which are reflected in this book. Invariably at both the
academic events and the talks to local groups, questions were posed
which made me think harder.
This book uses archaeological evidence, much of which has been
published quite recently, and I have also done fieldwork, but rarely
on my own. My collaborators, who have contributed to
interpretations as well as in practical matters, were David Aldred,
Jenny Dyer, Bryn Gethin, Paul Hargreaves, Pat Lacy, and Sarah
Wager.
The research includes work in specialist areas and I have had the
benefit of advice from experts, notably Umberto Albarella, Laura
Ashe, Jonathan Hart, Rose Hewlett, Matilda Holmes, Derek Hurst,
Michael Lewis, David Pannett, Stephanie Ratkai, and Terry Slater.
The contacts and conversations with fellow historians are too
numerous for all to be mentioned, but I have gained specific benefits
from Jean Birrell, Spencer Dimmock, Susan Kilby, Steve Rigby, and
Andrew Watkins.
 I do not have the space to thank individually all of the archivists
(in 25 depositories), librarians, and custodians of Historic
Environment Records of the three counties who have given me
access to sources and information. Worcester Cathedral Library in
the care of David Morrison has been especially welcoming. During
the Covid-19 pandemic, special help has been provided by the David
Wilson Library at the University of Leicester and the Wohl Library in
the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Worcestershire Archives and the Society of Antiquaries took trouble
to answer queries.
Documents have been used by kind permission of the President
and Fellows, Magdalen College, Oxford. I was also able to use the
archives of Corpus Christi College Oxford and King’s College
Cambridge. Figure 2.8 is reproduced by kind permission of the
Master and Fellows of Balliol College Oxford. I am grateful for the
hospitality and facilities of the library of Raynham Hall, Norfolk,
provided by the Marquess Townshend. Documents from the
Badminton archive can be cited by kind permission of the Duke of
Beaufort.
Theses and unpublished typescripts by various authors have
provide useful information and are acknowledged at the appropriate
places: they are M. Andrews, S. Dickson, R. Field, D. Greenblatt, C.
Hart, T. Lloyd, G. Scardellato, G. Smyth, A. Sutherland, J. Toomey,
and E. Vose.
I appreciate greatly the patience and expertise of the staff of the
Oxford University Press, and in particular my main contact, Cathryn
Steele.
As always, my wife supports and encourages my work in many
ways, including reading drafts, compiling the index, and contributing
to my understanding of history.

Christopher Dyer
Oadby, November 2021
 Notes on boundaries and measures

The region covers three counties, but their boundaries have changed
over time. I have tried to use as much as possible the boundaries
that existed between 1935 and 1974. Accordingly, the short-lived
county of Avon is not mentioned, enabling villages to the north of
Bristol to be described as in Gloucestershire. In the once
complicated area at the meeting point of Gloucestershire,
Warwickshire, and Worcestershire the boundaries after the reforms
of the 1930s are used, so that Alderminster, Quinton, Shipston-on-
Stour, and Welford-on-Avon are all here located in Warwickshire, and
Blockley in Gloucestershire. The Birmingham area is more entangled
in changes in local government, but the post-1974 West Midlands
can be ignored, and Solihull for example is here regarded as in
Warwickshire. Birmingham’s modern absorption of parts of
Worcestershire and Staffordshire are set aside, and King’s Norton,
Northfield, and Yardley are restored to Worcestershire. Halesowen,
once in Shropshire, is treated as part of Worcestershire, as is
Mathon, now in Herefordshire. Chaceley is now in Gloucestershire,
having previously been in Worcestershire.

Measures
Distances are given in miles as these are most readily understood in
the UK, but metric equivalents are indicated on maps. The metric
system (metres and centimetres) is in universal use by
archaeologists, so all references to dimensions of settlements,
buildings, artefacts, etc. are metric. Measures used in the past
(yards for cloth, acres for land), are retained, as also are sums of
money in £ s d and marks. Some measures appear in the glossary.
 Abbreviations

AgHR Agricultural History Review

BAH Birmingham Archives and Heritage
BGAS Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological
Society
CBA Council for British Archaeology
Cov Reg P. Coss and J.C. Lancaster Lewis, eds.,
Coventry Priory Register (DS, 46, 2013)
CR Elmley R.K. Field, ed., Court Rolls of Elmley Castle,
Worcestershire 1347–1564 (WHS, new series,
20, 2004)
CR Romsley M. Tompkins, ed., Court Rolls of Romsley
1279–1643 (WHS, new series, 27, 2017)
DS Dugdale Society
EcHR Economic History Review
GA Gloucestershire Archives
GRS Gloucestershire Record Series
Hist Glouc W. Hart, ed., Historia et Cartularium
Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae, 3 vols
(London, Rolls Series, 1867)
HTC M. Chibnall, ed., Charters and Custumals of
the Abbey of Holy Trinity Caen (British
Academy Records of Social and Economic
History, new series, 5, 1982)
IPM Inquisitions Post Mortem
Med Arch Medieval Archaeology
P&P Past and Present
PT C. Fenwick, ed., The Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379
and 1381, 3 parts (British Academy Records
of Social and Economic History, new series,
27, 29, 37, 1998, 2001, 2005)
Rec Feck For J.R. Birrell, ed., Records of Feckenham
Forest, Worcestershire, c.1236–1377 (WHS,
new series, 21, 2006)
Rec Hanley J. Toomey, ed., Records of Hanley Castle,
Worcestershire, c.1147–1547 (WHS, new
series, 18, 2001)
RBW M. Hollings, ed., Red Book of Worcester
(WHS, 1934–50).
Reg Guild M. Macdonald, ed., The Register of the Guild
of the Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon (DS,
42, 2007)
Reg Wig W. Hale, ed., Registrum Prioratus Beatae
Mariae Wigorniensis (Camden Society, 1865)
SCLA Shakespeare Centre Library and Archives,
Stratford-upon-Avon
SRO Staffordshire Record Office
TNA The National Archives
TBGAS Transactions of the Bristol and
Gloucestershire Archaeological Society
TBAS Transactions of the Birmingham
Archaeological Society
TBWAS Transactions of the Birmingham and
Warwickshire Archaeological Society
UNMSC University of Nottingham Manuscripts and
Special Collections
VCH Glouc, Victoria County History (Gloucestershire,
Warwickshire, Worcestershire)Warw, Worc
VE J. Caley and J. Hunter, eds., Valor
Ecclesiasticus temp Henry VIII (Record
Commission, 6 vols. 1810–34)
WAM Westminster Abbey Muniments
WCRO Warwickshire County Record Office
WHR T. John, ed., The Warwickshire Hundred Rolls
of 1279–80 (Records of Social and Economic
History, new series, 19, 1992)
WCL Worcester Cathedral Library
WA Worcestershire Archives
WHS Worcestershire Historical Society
 1
Introduction

This book is not a response to the neglect of peasants by historians.

Their historical significance has often been demonstrated, but this
book is a new venture in the sense that no one has attempted an
overview of the importance of peasants over a wide range of
themes, from agriculture to religion. 1 The approach is peasant-
centred, so it seeks to identify their contributions, and the changes
in which they participated, from their perspective. It is concerned
with peasants’ ideas and outlook, the controversies in which they
became embroiled, the decisions that they made, and the actions
that they took. Peasants were not gifted with free choices but were
under pressure from external forces, such as the demands of their
lords and the state, demographic movements, the hidden hand of
the market, economic growth and recession, environmental factors
including disasters, and political and religious movements. However,
plenty has been written about these long-term tendencies, and my
purpose is to give attention to peasants and their communities as
they experienced these changes, resisted or accommodated them,
and took advantage of opportunities they presented. Peasants varied
greatly, and among them many different life chances and
experiences can be found. Viewed as a mass, if we ignore their
names or individual identities, they can be depicted as weak,
miserable, poverty-stricken, ignorant, and unchanging. The narrative
is often a negative account of crisis and decline. However, if
disaggregated into individuals or small groups, a very different
picture emerges of people with varied ambitions, concerns,
knowledge, and the ability to make something of their lives.
Doubts about the use of the word ‘peasant’ were voiced briefly in
the late twentieth century. It was alleged that the term could not be
applied in medieval or modern England because the defining
characteristics of peasants were their subordination to the family
group, and their lack of participation in the market. 2 For a time the
rejection of the term peasants had some influence, and historians
experimented with an alternative vocabulary, such as ‘villagers’ or
even ‘agriculturalists’, but wiser views eventually prevailed and it was
realized that the rural population across the world and over long
periods could have different ways of life, but bore enough
resemblance to one another to be usefully described as peasants. 3
‘Peasant’ can be applied to a wide range of country people who
possessed land in relatively small quantities (as small as the plot
attached to a cottage, as large as 50 acres). They often produced
their own food using family labour, so to some extent they were not
dependent on the market. They were relatively poor and were
socially subordinate, though they gained some benefit from
belonging to communities. They were not farmers, who were a
special category of leaseholders, often holding large amounts of
land, employing labour and producing for the market. Some
peasants can also be called labourers because they earned wages
part-time, but most of them lived partly on the produce of their
holdings. Many peasants were also serfs, but their servile status did
not define them, as there were numerous free peasants. ‘Villagers’ is
an alternative term of limited value, because although all rural
people lived in units of government called villages or vills, the word
village is often reserved for large compact settlements, and most
people lived in hamlets or scattered farms. Peasants were not all
male, because wives, daughters, and female servants formed part of
the household and did much of the labour on the holding, and in
some circumstances, especially widowhood, women were in charge.
Peasants were involved in agriculture, but they did not disqualify
themselves from the category of peasant by working also in crafts or
retail trade. 4 All of this is written in the past tense, because the
example of late medieval England is in the forefront of the author’s
attention. However, the definition can be applied widely. In the
fourteenth century the majority of the English, European, and
Eurasian population can be described as peasants, and although
they have become extinct in modern England, and have greatly
diminished in continental Europe (though still surviving in some
countries and can be known as ‘family farmers’), in Asia, Africa, and
much of South America they have modernized and are active in
great numbers, accounting according to one estimate for a third of
the world’s population. 5
By including the term peasant in our historical vocabulary, it is
much easier to communicate with other disciplines because the word
is used and understood by social scientists, archaeologists, and
geographers. International comparisons are also helped by sharing
terminology; if we can agree on the types of people under
discussion, similarities and differences can be more easily identified.
An argument for ‘English exceptionalism’, that is, the belief that
England was uniquely different in having no peasantry (and in many
other ways), prevents any attempt at comparison.
This book has been made possible by a recent tendency in
historical writing to give medieval peasants more prominence. For a
long time, historians were using such phrases as ‘lords and peasants’
and tended to focus on peasants in their role as tenants, so they
were seen as payers of rent, performers of labour services, and
attenders at the lords’ courts. Lords were imagined to have been the
main producers and innovators. It was widely assumed that the
planning of villages, the organization of field systems, farming
methods, and much else followed mainly from initiatives by lords.
Now we have learnt not to regard peasants as appendages of the
seigneurial regime, nor as its victims, but as players in their own
right, with resources, traditions, and ideas of their own.
The ‘peasant-centred’ approach has come from a number of
different directions. An important influence has been historians on
the left, who are associated with the ‘history from below’ approach.
Peasant revolts, and especially the English Rising of 1381 has
attracted interest from the progressive historians since the 1890s. 6
Although historians from a Marxist perspective have written about
rebellious peasants, they have not been as ‘peasant-centred’ as
might be expected. One obstacle has been Marx’s assumption that
the industrial working class was uniquely capable of revolution, so
that other discontented plebeians were overshadowed. Also, the
analysis of the ‘feudal mode of production’ focusses attention on the
‘struggle for rent’ between lords and peasants, which is portrayed as
giving feudal society its dynamic capacity to change. 7 This is difficult
to reconcile with an agenda to give pride of place to social
differences within the village, peasant culture, and interactions
among peasants. It is, however, important to be reminded that
lordship was a presence and a strong influence throughout, which
some enthusiasts for peasant autonomy are prone to forget.
Since the 1970s an important development in studies of peasants
in the Middle Ages has been the interest of historians and historical
geographers with a strong social science background, based mainly
at Cambridge. Their initial agenda was to investigate the extent to
which the demographic regime of early modern north-western
Europe, based on the European Marriage Pattern, went back before
the sixteenth century. This research broadened to include not just
marriage, but such subjects as the land market, inheritance, social
welfare, servants, and credit. 8 The main sources were manorial
court rolls, and the lords’ presence is fully acknowledged in these
investigations. Beginning rather earlier than the Cambridge research,
the Toronto school of historians were also approaching peasants
from a social science perspective, and they carried out
comprehensive analyses of village life, with a special concern for
office holding and stratification. 9
The history of women and gender in general has drawn on the
abundant sources relating to the aristocracy, nunneries, and urban
society, but peasant women have received a good deal of attention.
In particular their leading role in brewing and selling ale has been
highlighted, and also their contribution to rural labour, raising issues
relating to pay differences between male and female workers. 10 A
controversial view, applied more to urban than peasant women,
suggests that in the shortage of labour after 1349 women became
more independent, their marriages were delayed, prolonging the
demographic recession, and in the long term they made an
important contribution to the supply of workers. 11
Economic historians tend to be drawn to the abundant manorial
accounts and surveys which have primarily provided information
about lords’ demesnes and rent income. They include receipts from
tithes, which as they represent a tenth of the crops of each parish,
are a guide to peasant crops. Notable work on tithes came from a
study of peasant grain production in Durham over two centuries.
Among other findings, it was shown that peasants changed the
acreage of types of grain in relation to price movements. 12 Mills
were an important source of revenue for lords, who usually leased
out the mill for a substantial sum of money. The miller drew an
income and paid the rent from the tolls paid by the peasants who
were compelled to take their grain to their lords’ mill. However, some
mills escaped from close supervision, mainly before 1200, and the
peasant tenants who paid a modest rent for a mill outside manorial
control had the chance of profiting from the toll revenue. 13 A
sophisticated study of demesne policy in the fourteenth century,
which explained the various decisions about agricultural
management made by lords’ officials (many of them peasant
reeves), made comparisons between demesnes and peasant
holdings. An important finding was that peasants who seemed to
have small numbers of animals actually kept a higher density of
livestock than many lords. Similar conclusions have emerged from
peasant animals recorded in tax records. 14 The historian who had
done the most thorough study of lords’ agriculture based mainly on
manorial accounts turned to assess our understanding of the
peasant economy in the early fourteenth century, and concluded that
tenants could derive advantages from fixed rents, and could
profitably sublet their land. 15
 These are just some examples of the growing appreciation of the
need to include peasants in any analysis of medieval society and
economy, and they are selected from dozens of publications which
give peasants careful attention. There are useful contributions to
peasant history in the Agrarian Histories, general surveys of
medieval economy and society, and the various handbooks aimed at
both students and general readers. 16 Taking peasants seriously as
historical players in their own right is a feature of work on the early
medieval period, for which sources are not so thin as is sometimes
supposed. 17
Specialized fields of historical enquiry have also extended their
scope to include the ordinary people of the medieval countryside.
Legal historians whose concern was understandably focussed on
parliament, the Westminster courts, and the workings of the
common law have devoted more attention to manorial courts. This
has led to them analysing customary law, exploring procedures such
as the role of juries, and examining issues of tenure. All of these
were directly the concern of peasants, and have led to legal
historians appreciating the knowledge and understanding shown by
peasant litigants and officials. 18 Peasants were by no means
confined to their local courts, and had a role as jurors in royal
courts. 19 Canon law courts, so important in their influence on
marriage, were dependent like the secular courts on ordinary people
prepared to report on their neighbours’ behaviour, and on those
bringing forward litigation. 20 A similar development among
historians of religion has led them to give more attention to ‘popular’
religion, and to take more seriously expressions of piety from all
ranks of the laity. Participation by peasants in the life of the church
has resulted from greater interest in parish churches and the parish
in general. 21 The study of late medieval English literature has
traditionally been focussed on works intended for an elite audience,
and historians rather than literary scholars showed more interest in
such popular work as the Robin Hood ballads and the shorter pieces
sometimes called ‘political songs’. Historical interest has been
maintained, but literary scholars have shown more concern for works
appreciated by a large general audience. 22 Linguistic studies were
always anchored in everyday speech, but without explicit links being
made to peasant society. The interaction between social historians
and place-name scholars has enabled local names to be explored
more directly as evidence for peasant perceptions of their
surroundings. 23
Medieval archaeology and its close allies, landscape history and
vernacular architecture, began together in the mid twentieth century
in a surge of interest in villages, fields, and rural non-elite houses.
The practitioners proclaimed their objectives of discovering authentic
peasant houses and exploring the daily lives of peasants. 24 To some
extent that initial focus has shifted, as the study of castles,
churches, monasteries, and above all towns occupied important
places on the agenda. The archaeology of the peasantry has
survived with the ‘peasant house’ still a central concern but now with
more interest in material culture and the environmental context.
Landscape history (or landscape archaeology as it is often called)
has not lost its early enthusiasm for rural settlements, fields, and
associated sites. 25
This book can draw on the insights and achievements of many
scholars, and they indicate the possibility of a broad enquiry into the
full peasant experience, giving a more complete picture of the
peasant contribution to late medieval life. Such a survey is more
difficult to achieve if it is spread over a very large geographical area,
and so is focussed here on one region, the west midlands. This
region, consisting of the counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire,
and Worcestershire, was an obvious choice because the author is
familiar with its documents and landscape. Treating the three
counties together was not an original idea, because it was chosen by
Rodney Hilton for his study, modelled on French regional surveys,
which covers the whole social spectrum concentrating on the period
around 1300. 26 Writing this book has been aided not only by many
works of Hilton’s, but also by a dozen other scholars who have
researched and written about the region and edited major texts,
many of them influenced by him.
 The region offers many other advantages. Its landscape is very
varied, which allows comparisons to be made between open-field
country with large villages, and woodlands where people lived in
hamlets and in isolation, with some high ground (though no
mountains) and areas of wetland. No region is typical, but the west
midland region is free of idiosyncratic or very specialized
characteristics. It was not dominated by a powerful lord, like county
Durham, nor was it as urbanized as Suffolk, or as densely populated
or intensively farmed as Norfolk, nor as unusually free as in Kent,
nor as industrialized as parts of the south-west.
The period covered is divided into equal parts by the plague
epidemic of 1349, and the content of the book reflects the
differences between the growth of the thirteenth century which
slowed or ended between 1300 and 1350, and the subsequent
period of retreat but also new developments. We might be drawn
into the belief that the Black Death was an overwhelming disaster
and a decisive turning point, and certainly the west midlands
suffered a very high mortality in what one source calls ‘the first
pestilence’ (in the context of the subsequent lesser outbreak in
1361–2). However, many developments began well before the fateful
year and continued, such as the advance of peasant freedom, the
rise of peasants with larger holding, the desertion of villages and
abandonment of cultivated land, and the growth of some towns and
industries. It is often said that women advanced their status and
independence after 1349, but the records used for this book show
women behaving decisively in the management of their inheritance
in the early fourteenth century.
How can we write peasant-centred history, emphasizing their
contribution to change without any sources written by them? There
are no letters, diaries, or autobiographies. Instead, the main sources
were written by clerks working in the administration of lords, church,
and state and serving their purposes. We must use skill and
imagination to counter the perspectives of the institutions which
filtered and coloured the information that they provide. This is not so
difficult because behind many of the sources lie the spoken words of
peasants. They reported to the courts, and as litigants argued their
cases, and some of their words formed the basis of the written
record. When a peasant’s will was recorded, he or she was often
suffering a last illness, but could still make bequests to be written by
the clerk, though the details may have been prompted by the clerk’s
suggestions. A manorial account was based on the spoken words of
the reeve, an unfree peasant, with the help of aids to memory such
as tally sticks. The document was prepared by the clerk using a
template. For us to hear the voice of the peasant is not always an
effort of imagination, as English phrases were included in the
documents when the clerk’s Latin failed him. Cattle grazing illicitly on
a common because a peasant had sold his rights to a butcher were
called ‘chapman’s wares’. Landmarks in deeds might include ‘a
nether hadelond’ or a ‘wateryngplace’. A marriage agreed by mutual
consent was called a ‘handfasting’. These glimpses of everyday
speech are very satisfying, but almost all written records were Latin
texts recording legal processes in conventional formulae. They were
written for the lords or the government for particular ends, rarely for
the benefit of the peasants, and never to help future historians.
Archaeological evidence appears to give us direct access to the
illiterate and underprivileged. If a village, or part of one, is
excavated and its surroundings surveyed the houses, fields, material
goods (pottery and metalwork) and animal bones and plant remains
are laid out before us as they were abandoned by the peasant
occupants. Of course the meaning of the surviving data is by no
means straightforward. The record is incomplete because organic
building materials and artefacts of wood, leather, and cloth have not
survived. We cannot be sure how the house was occupied, and we
have no information about the status of the tenant or builder. The
dates of building and abandonment are based usually on pottery
which is often imprecise, and the material from the final phases is
mingled with debris from earlier periods. The surrounding landscape
has much evidence of boundaries and some for the use of land, but
ownership, tenancy, and management are matters for conjecture.
 This book is based on a sample of evidence. Every major
collection of manuscripts has been visited, and transcripts and notes
made, but much has had to be left unread. The largest collection is
in Worcester Cathedral Library, which includes a series of court rolls
for eighteen of its larger manors for most of the years between 1314
and 1520. All of the rolls for six sample years have been read, and
all of the rolls for two manors, Blackwell and Shipston and Cleeve
Prior. Many of the other rolls have been used in parts.
A higher proportion of the contents of other archives of manorial
records have been transcribed or summarized, but rarely all those
surviving for one place or estate. Some public records in print such
as the Hundred Rolls, the lay subsidies, the poll taxes, the
inquisitions post mortem, and the Valor Ecclesiasticus have been
used often, but the voluminous unpublished records of the courts of
King’s Bench and Common Pleas have been barely scratched.
All of the archaeological reports with relevant material—that is,
relating to villages and other peasant sites—have been consulted,
and also surveys and reports resulting from landscape history
projects. The author has done field work, mostly in south
Warwickshire, the north Cotswolds, and in parts of woodland
Worcestershire.
The purpose of this book is to use as much evidence as possible,
hopefully overcoming the many problems of interpretation, in order
to answer the central questions about the parts that peasants played
in creating, promoting, and resisting change in a representative
region between 1200 and 1540.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher

Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0001

1 G.C. Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA,

1941); R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975);
P.D.A. Harvey, ed., The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England (Oxford, 1984);
R.M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984); B.A. Hanawalt,
The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986); J.
Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk,
1440–1580 (Oxford, 2000); P.R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval
England, 1200–1500 (Basingstoke, 2003); P.R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians:
Debating the Medieval English Peasantry (Manchester, 2016). For continental
Europe, see M.M. Postan, ed., The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, 2nd edn, 1966); W. Rösener, Peasants in the
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985); T. Scott, ed., The Peasantries of Europe (Harlow,
1998).
2 A. Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978).
3 P.R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians, pp. 22–3; T. Shanin, ed. Peasants
and Peasant Societies (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 14–17.
4 For a useful definition in a European context, see P. Freedman, Images of
the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 9–12.
5 Hilton, English Peasantry, pp. 12–13; F. Ellis, Peasant Economics (Cambridge,
1993); E. Vanhaute, Peasants in World History (London, 2021).
6 E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896); R.H. Hilton,
Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of
1381 (London, 1973).
7 C.J. Wickham, ‘How Did the Feudal Economy Work? The Economic Logic of
Medieval Societies’, P&P 251 (2021), pp. 3–40.
8 R.M. Smith, Land, Kinship and Lifecycle; L.R. Poos, A Rural Society after the
Black Death: Essex 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991); Z. Razi and R.M. Smith, eds.,
Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996); R.M. Smith, ‘The English
Peasantry, 1250–1650’, in T. Scott, ed., Peasantries; c. Briggs, Credit and Village
Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2009).
9 J.A. Raftis, Tenure and Mobility. Studies in the Social History of the Medieval
English Village (Toronto, 1964); E. Britton, The Community of the Vill (Toronto,
1977).
10 J.M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and
Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford, 1987); J.M. Bennett, Ale, Beer
and Brewsters in England (Oxford, 1996); M.E. Mate, Daughters, Wives and
Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, 1998).
11 PJ.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy. Women
in York and Yorkshire c.1300–1520 (Oxford, 1992); T. de Moor and J.L van
Zanden, ‘Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Market in the
North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, EcHR 63 (2010),
pp. 1–33.
12 B. Dodds, Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East. The Evidence
of Tithes, 1270–1536 (Woodbridge, 2007).
 13 R. Holt, ‘Whose were the Profits of Corn Milling? The Abbots of Glastonbury
and their Tenants, 1086–1350’, P&P 116 (1987), pp. 3–23.
14 D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford, 2005), pp. 262–
72. P. Slavin, ‘Peasant Livestock Husbandry in Late Thirteenth-Century Suffolk:
Economy, Environment and Society’, in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English
Economy, edited by M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon, and P.R. Schofield (Turnhout,
2015), pp. 3–26.
15 B.M.S. Campbell, ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’,
P&P 188 (2005), pp. 3–70.
16 H.E. Hallam, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, 2, 1042–1350
(Cambridge, 1988); E. Miller, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, 3, 1350–
1500 (Cambridge, 1991); R.H. Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530 (Oxford,
2004); S.H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford,
2003).
17 C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean
400–800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 383–588.
18 J.S. Beckerman, ‘Procedural Innovation and Institutional Change in Medieval
English Manorial Courts’, Law and History Review 10 (1992), pp. 197–252; L.R.
Poos and L. Bonfield, eds., Select Cases in Manorial Courts (Selden Society, 114
(1998).
19 J. Masschaele, Jury, State and Society in Medieval England (Basingstoke,
2008).
20 R.H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974);
L.R. Poos, ed., Lower Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in Late-Medieval England (British
Academy Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, 32, 2001).
21 A.D. Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of
Salisbury, 1200–1550 (Oxford, 1995); K.L. French, The People of the Parish:
Community Life in a Late Medieval Diocese (Philadelphia, PA, 2001); B. Kumin, The
Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–
1560 (Aldershot, 1996).
22 S. Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford,
1994).
23 S. Kilby, Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape (Hatfield, 2020).
24 C. Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology. Understanding Traditions and
Contemporary Approaches (London, 2003), pp. 95–132).
25 N. Christie and P. Stamper, eds., Medieval Rural Settlement. Britain and
Ireland, AD 800–1600 (Oxford, 2012); M. Gardiner and S. Rippon, eds., Medieval
Landscapes (Macclesfield, 2007); S. Mileson, ‘Openness and Closure in Later
Medieval Villages’, P&P 234 (2017), pp. 3–37.
 26 R.H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the
Thirteenth Century (revised edition, Cambridge, 1983).
 2
Peasants and landscapes

Landscapes provide the physical setting for people’s lives, and

geology and topography had a strong influence on farming, housing,
communications, and economy. On the other hand, people could
make choices about settlements and the organization and use of
land which had an impact on the landscape. Two questions arise
from this interaction between society and the land: How important
was the human factor in forming landscapes, and which sections of
society exerted most influence; in particular what was the peasants’
role? Before addressing these questions the region and its various
landscapes, must be introduced.

The west-midland region

The west-midland region is defined here as the counties of
Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire, three modern
shires with origins before 1066 (Figure 2.1). The boundaries of these
shires began to be established by the seventh century, when the
kingdom of the Hwicce had been assigned a bishop based at
Worcester. The kingdom died in the ninth century, but its frontiers
were fossilized in those of the Worcester diocese. Four shires were
formed from this territory in the tenth and eleventh centuries;
originally Winchcomb in the north Cotswolds was the head of a
separate shire, which was subsequently absorbed into
Gloucestershire. 1 Worcestershire was extended to the north-west
along the Teme valley beyond the boundary of the diocese. The
western parts of Warwickshire had been in the kingdom of the
Hwicce, but when the shire boundary was drawn it took in a large
area to the east up to Watling Street. Gloucestershire largely
coincided with the southern end of the kingdom and its diocese,
except that it took in land to the west of the Severn, including the
Forest of Dean which came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of
the bishops of Hereford. These units of local government were
political institutions designed to perform specific tasks, but they
derived some unity from the inclusion within their borders of the
River Severn and its tributaries, in the east the Warwickshire Avon,
and its tributaries such as the Arrow, Stour, and Dene, and in the
west the Leadon, Teme, and Worcestershire Stour. South of
Gloucester the Severn was fed by small rivers that flowed from east
to west from the Cotswolds, notably the Frome, the Cam, and the
Little Avon. Observers could stand on high ground, such as the
Malvern Hills, the Birmingham plateau and its outliers to the north,
Edge Hill to the east and the Cotswold escarpment to the south, and
overlook a shallow bowl of valley land 36 miles across. Not all of the
rivers flowed into the Severn, as in the north of Warwickshire the
waters of the Blythe and Tame ended in the Trent, and most of the
Gloucestershire Cotswolds were drained by the Evenlode, Windrush,
Coln, and Churn which flowed southward into the Thames. The bulk
of the land could be cultivated. The predominant soils are heavy,
either the reddish marls associated with Mercian mudstone to the
west and north of the region, or the grey lias clays of the eastern
lowlands. The Cotswolds have ‘calcareous earths’ containing chips of
oolitic limestone. Light alluvial soils occur mostly in the river valleys,
though there are occasional patches of sand. The western edge of
the region, notably Dean and Malvern, are characterized by ancient
rocks and a variety of soils. 2
Figure 2.1 Topography of the west midland region.

The people of the three shires in the later Middle Ages must have
been well aware of the unifying river valleys and the religious centre
at Worcester. Together with their dialect of English these may have
given them a sense of attachment to the region. They would also
have recognized very clearly the varieties of countryside, with which
we are familiar from the writings of the early modern topographers
and county historians such as Leland, Camden, Habington, and
Dugdale: they used such terms as forest, woodland, wold,
champion, and Feldon (Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 Landscape divisions of the west midland region.

Areas of land devoted to large trees and underwood were

especially prominent in ‘the Forest’, that is the Forest of Dean. Royal
forests occupied much of Worcestershire, notably in Feckenham in
the east and Malvern to the west, and the short-lived Ombersley and
Horwell. In south-western Gloucestershire lay Kingswood. These
were legally defined hunting reserves, which gave the king the
opportunity to hunt but also to raise revenue by fining the
inhabitants for offences against the beasts of the chase and the
vegetation that gave them shelter. Ombersley and Horwell ceased to
be forests in 1218, and Malvern became a chase, a private forest of
the earls of Gloucester. In north Warwickshire Sutton Chase
belonged to the earls of Warwick. 3 The boundaries of the forests
and chases included some important woods, but also many
settlements and fields with few trees or deer.
‘Woodland’ described a large area of the west and north of the
region, where important features as well as trees, were the areas of
pasture, often in extensive greens, heaths, commons, and moors. In
the woodlands the arable lay in small open fields, often with five or
more in a single township, and in enclosed crofts; the land was
farmed from hamlets (often called greens and ends) and single
farmsteads. Figure 2.3 shows the oddly shaped parish of Pendock,
with houses strung along winding lanes, with an occasional cluster.
The land included six fields, many crofts, parcels of assarts bearing
distinctive clearance names like rudding and Newland, with access to
large meadows and a moor for summer grazing. The country along
the Severn in Gloucestershire below the hills, the Vale, resembled
woodland landscapes in many ways, with dispersed settlements and
many enclosed parcels. Similarly the wold shared many
characteristics with champion country, as both types of landscape
cultivated large areas of open field land, often divided into two
fields, and their settlements were usually nucleated villages with
between twelve and forty households. Figure 2.4 shows the village
of Aston Blank and its original two fields, later divided into four,
typically with a small grove. 4 ‘Wold’ originally meant ‘woodland’, and
extensive woods occupied parts of the Cotswolds and still do, but
‘wold’ for medieval people referred to high ground with extensive
cultivation, though having access to hill pasture. Champion ran
eastwards from the confluence of the Avon and Severn along the
Avon valley and below the Cotswold edge, including the Vale of
Evesham (‘the granary of Worcestershire’) and parts of central
Worcestershire, and then extended across south and east
Warwickshire. Here it was called the Feldon—in fact, the English
equivalent of champion as both English feld and French champ refer
to the abundance of arable land in open fields. 5
Figure 2.3 Pendock, Worcestershire. This parish was taken out of
a larger land unit before the Conquest in a process that left it in two
pieces. It lay within Malvern Chase. This reconstruction of its
landscape in c.1300 shows scattered houses, winding roads, fields,
crofts, assarts, meadows, and a moor. Its detached wood was in
another parish (source: note 4).
Figure 2.4 Aston Blank, Gloucestershire (also called Cold Aston—it
was sited on high ground in the Cotswolds). In c.1300, two
settlements shared arable in two fields, with pasture and a small
grove. By 1752, when the map shows the strips (selions) and
furlongs, a single settlement was cultivating arable in four fields,
and the northern area was enclosed (see Figures 6.1 and 6.4 for
open-field villages in champion areas) (source: note 4).

The four types of landscape—woodland, vale, wold, and

champion—contained some distinctive subdivisions, such as the
wetlands along the Severn estuary, and the less extensive marshes
of Longdon marsh (in west Worcestershire) and the Henmarsh near
Moreton in north-east Gloucestershire. Distinctive wooded valleys
were an important feature of the mid Cotswolds, around Stroud,
Woodchester, and Painswick. Relatively flat country is seen as the
Cotswolds dip gently into the Thames valley around Lechlade. Some
of the landscape boundaries were and are sharp and distinct, like
the ‘edge’ to the north and west of the Cotswolds, but sometimes
we find hybrid frontier zones, leaving us uncertain as to how to
classify, for example, the villages on the northern and western sides
of the valley of the Warwickshire Avon.
Historic landscapes can partly be characterized from their
topography of hills and valleys, and from the management of their
land, but they were inhabited and a full assessment of the character
of landscapes needs to take into account the human and social
dimension. Peasants held land as tenants, and were subordinated to
lords, and these social conditions had implications for their
settlements and lands. Large church landlords, who were especially
prominent in the southern parts of the region, had developed
combinations of manors located in champion, woodland, and wold,
as the varied resources of these landscapes benefited the estates’
production and consumption. However, champion and wold lands
predominated, and as bishops and Benedictine monasteries
exercised considerable social power, strengthened by continuous
control over centuries, their lordship involved a high proportion of
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